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RE: [Asrg] Several Observations and a solution that addresses them all

2003-03-11 11:11:06
I don't share in your pessimism. If we can make reasonable assurances that
in 5 years spam is a thing of the past, then I think we'll hop on board.

According to your logic, we should never buy houses because it will never
pay off. We should just stick to renting, because it's cheap and it works
well enough.

Yeah, right.

-----Original Message-----
From: Kee Hinckley [mailto:nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 12:51 PM
To: Jason Hihn
Cc: asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: RE: [Asrg] Several Observations and a solution that addresses
them all


At 9:58 AM -0500 3/11/03, Jason Hihn wrote:
There is one goal: to eliminate spam. If you want social
implications at 10,
50 and 90 percent then you are missing the point. Social implications are
irrelevant. Economic ones are the only ones that drive anything. I don't
care if Joe Blow wants a new spam proof email system - he doesn't control
his mail servers. His ISP does. And his ISP doesn't want to pay for spam.
Even if it costs him 15% more than non-spam email (assuming 80%
of email is
spam) that's still significant cost reduction.

Call it social or economic, it's the same thing.  So, let's look at
the incentives to the ISP.

The ISP installs a system that keeps track of all outbound messages
and who they went to (is that legal in the EU?) and sets up code to
respond to verifications.  It then also sets up code to verify all
incoming mail against the sender's database.

When this is the only ISP to have implemented this service, how many
spam messages do they block?  Zero.

When 10% of the ISPs have implemented this system, how many spam
messages do they block?  Far less than 10%.  Because of course, most
spammers aren't sending from these ISPs in the first place--and they
certainly aren't sending from these ISPs once they've implemented the
system.

So. You are asking the ISP to gamble that this technology is the one
that will be deployed world-wide.  And you are further asking them to
make this outlay with the full knowledge that the system will not be
useful until the majority of the world is using it.  Because until
that time, it is not practical to block messages that don't verify.

It's not going to happen.
--
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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