ietf-822
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Re: authenticating the source of mail

2002-05-07 14:59:19

At 05:01 PM 5/7/2002 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
> ISPs have their own incentives.  They care about complaints from their
> customers.  They do not care about much more.

ISPs care about profit, which equates to cost and market share.
Figure out a way to significantly reduce cost of dealing with spam
and/or to increase market share and ISPs will be interested.
I think I have a handle on the former.

my experience with ISPs -- based on a subscript-based volume email startup that I work with -- is that spam is only interesting to them in terms of customer complaints. Some will complain about bandwidth consumption but they do not seem to work very hard at 'fixing' that problem directly. (I just heard a second-hand hotmail statistic that says 95% of the email they receive is spam. Hard to imagine such a volume.)


> It is mail originators and recipients who are the "participants" that must
> press for the mechanisms.

ISPs participate also.  Their costs of dealing with both spam and viruses
are significant.

Their cost is relatively minor, unless it threatens their customer base.

  A number of ISPs are now using filters or interception
proxies to control mail flow to give them a hook to monitor and/or filter
traffic for spam and viruses.

my point is that they do this more for marketing advantage than for operations survival.

i don't view the marketing basis as bad, but merely something that clarifies the motives and incentives.

d/

----------
Dave Crocker  <mailto:dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking  <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253;  fax +1.408.850.1850