At 9:03 AM -0500 3/5/03, David F. Skoll wrote:
1) Spammers want to send out lots of messages cheaply, and don't
particularly care if any one message gets through. Legitimate mass
mailers want all of their messages to get through.
Actually that is different in theory than in practice.
I have had technical support people at bulk mailer providers tell me
that they are not allowed to prune bounces out of lists because
marketing doesn't want to tell the customer that the list just shrank
25% (Not to mention that they are charging per-address, not
per-delivered-message.) If they do that, the customer will take
their business elsewhere, because they don't want to tell *their*
boss that they don't have nearly as many contacts as they thought.
They avoid confirmed opt-in for the same reason.
If there were a substantial cost of delivery, or a legal cost for
screwing up, this would change. Currently the cost of cleaning a
list is greater than the cost of sending undeliverable mail or
quietly unwanted mail; even for legitimate mailers.
2) This is just a hunch, but I bet it's true: Spammers probably have a
higher proportion of bad addresses on their lists than mass-mailers. We
can help ensure this by poisoning their lists with web pages of fake
addresses.
Oh please. Not poisoning. Just what we wanted. More bandwidth use.
Every one of those poisoned message gets an attempted delivery.
Every one generates a bounce. Every bounce tries to go somewhere
else. Have you ever been the return address on a spam mailing? You
want to see your mail server go to its knees?
Poisoning spam lists is just contributing to the spam-as-DoS problem.
Please don't. And God-forbid your poisoner uses an address that is
fake today, but real tomorrow. I don't trust anybody's idea of what
kind of address is "fake". Why do you think somewhere.com bounced
ten million messages last year?
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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