ietf-822
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Re: draft-lilly-from-optional-01.txt

2005-02-24 19:26:17


[...] On the other hand, recipients who might
reasonably expect to receive anonymous messages would almost
certainly not use anti-spam software that discards such messages.



Unfortunately this is just not the way things are headed. Users are
increasingly not able to control these sorts of actions being done on their
behalf. For example, Sun filters all incoming mail and summarily discards
everything it thinks is spam. (In fact a recent misconfiguration led to a 
bunch
of mail being discarded incorrectly.) I have absolutely no control over this -
no way to change filter threshholds, no personal whitelist, no Bayesian
training, no option to file spam in a spam folder, nothing. And while it is
perhaps true that I wouldn't want and have no business receiving anonymous 
mail
sent to my Sun account, I deal with large ISP setups  all the time and I can
tell you that many if not most of them are similarly set up and are similarly
inflexible.


I'd like to add to this that commercial filter providers consider
their rules a competitive trade secret. Thus, until there is an outcry
against closed source filters (which may never happen), users will
never have the kind of control over receipt of anonymous messages that
Bruce is positing. Moreover, most users have no idea how the email system
works in the first place, and wouldn't know what they are missing.

-- 
Laird Breyer.