Re: [Asrg] Re: Spam, defined, and permissions, and SICS

[Seth Breidbart <sethb at panix.com>]

gep2 at terabites.com wrote:

>>> First off, if the E-mail is stored at the recipient end (where it
>>> makes sense to keep it, and process it, since that's where the bulk
>>> of the processing and storage resources are),
>>
>> Then it has already consumed last-mile bandwidth, 
>
> True enough.
>
>> ...which can be the most expensive part of the process, 
>
> Well, in some cases, yes.  I'd argue that the most expensive part of the process 
> is the time of the recipient, having to deal with the spam.

Quite possibly; but the time of the recipient waiting for email to
download over dialup is the same time.

>> ...and is often the limiting factor.
>
> Again, on dialups, maybe.  Spam bandwidth is a pretty small percentage of (say) 
> a cable connection, or a DSL line, or other more modern forms of connection.... 

There are still many (most?) users with dialup.

>>> Typical spam messages (once you strip the HTML garbage out of them)
>> Who strips the HTML?  
>
> I think that the best way is for the recipient's machine to do that,

Then you don't get to say the message is small when transmitted to the
user.

>> Setting up systems to safely allow users to choose their own filters
>> tends to be expensive, and is a non-trivial issue.  
>
> I disagree;  again, it's more complicated if the ISP is trying to do it, but if 
> the process is done in the recipient's mail client (or something reasonably well 
> linked to that, perhaps a plugin or something) there's nothing that says it has 
> to be difficult, cumbersome, or costly.

I know how much technical support my mother needs.  I'll believe such
a system can exist when she uses it without support.

There are a lot more AOL users than procmail programmers.

> Good applications programmers solve FAR more difficult applications
> design problems every day.  Something like this is HARDLY rocket
> science.

The last time you wrote a program for use by AOL's userbase was when?

>> It's not so bad for a small ISP with clueful users; but I wouldn't want to 
>> even think about AOL's customer support issue if they tried it.
>
> Dunno, they decided to provide anti-spyware, anti-virus software to their 
> customers.

Mostly by not letting the users configure it.

>  Yahoo provides spam filtering, and theirs works reasonably well and
> presumably hasn't been a support nightmare.

Again, the users don't get to configure it.  (They do get buttons to
say "this is (not) spam" which feeds back to the controller, but the
users don't get to say "I want this stuff so you can't filter it any
more".)

Seth

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