Re: Why spam is a problem.

[Måns Nilsson <mansaxel at besserwisser.org>]

--On Tuesday, August 13, 2002 19:45:07 -0400 Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu>
wrote:

> I'm doing this now for one user community, with mixed results.  In
> particular, I'm surprised at the number of users whose email addresses
> are valid (in that if you send them mail, it will get there eventually),
> but for whom attempts  to validate their addresses via SMTP fairly
> consistently fail for temporary reasons (e.g. DNS timeout, SMTP doesn't
> respond, SMTP returns 4xx).

to this reader the above strongly suggests that we ought not to mess with
the "try-really-hard" principle of SMTP, just because some small amount of
spam reduction can be had by making delivery "brittler" or subject to more
conditions having been met. 

-- 
Måns Nilsson    http://vvv.besserwisser.org