On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 11:17:00PM -0800, Brad Templeton allegedly wrote:
If the reports that spam costs USD 8Billion per year are even close to
the truth, it strikes me that imposing an MTA upgrade to avoid much of
that recurring cost is a pretty small price to pay.
Well, I would not credit a number like that, but in any event even
if it were larger, there is a question of what is practical. You
certainly aren't going to get all people to upgrade MUAs. And I
seriously doubt you will get them to upgrade MTAs.
However, a far more attainable goal is to require those who host
mailing lists (ie. legitimtae bulk mailers) to get a new MTA.
Okay. You'll need to use small words and short sentences for me. We
don't change MUAs, we don't change the inbound MTAs, we don't change
the ratware used by spammers, yet somehow by changing just the MTAs
used by legit bulk mailers we reduce spam? I've obviously missed
something.
Besides, on the MTA front I think you're way pessimistic. The desire
to reduce spam is real, rampant, intense and user driven. A lazy
sysadmin may not bother with security updates because his
manager/users don't understand the cost/benefit. Do the users/manager
understand the cost/benefit of a new and effective anti-spam system
they read about in the local paper? Heck yeah. Do they bug their IT
folk for the upgrade? Damn straight!
And this isn't just speculation on my part. I see user surveys from a
major Mail Service Provider and the number of people who bother to
response to surveys that ask about stopping spam is two orders of
magnitude higher than any other survey on any other matter. True!
In short I think we're lucky in that the average Joe, most of the
press and all of the email admins of the world are in total agreement
that spam is a very real problem. If people need to make a change to
thwart spam, my guess is that the response rate will be rapid and
high.
Another besides is that we're not necessarily talking about a lot of
MTAs. If, eg, the major MSPs, such as Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL adopted
this new anti-spam system and the benefits become readily apparent to
the service providers and their users, then you're already pretty
close to a critical mass. The cost of spam is a very strong motivator
for these MSPs.
Regards.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg