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Re: [Asrg] This research group will fail

2003-03-19 15:16:30
At 8:17 PM +0000 3/19/03, Matt Sergeant wrote:
The last thing *I* want to do is prevent an answer to the spam problem
happening.

Ditto. I got into this business because I had a serious problem that I needed to solve. Everyone else was looking at the tip of the iceberg, and somewhere.com was somewhere down in the middle (I used to think we were at the bottom, but striker clearly gets that award). In my experience, companies do best when they are building things for people like themselves. So getting into this business made sense. But I would absolutely love to live in a world where the business didn't need to exist.

I will agree that most of my comments on this list (over 100 so far) have been negative. Breaking things is what I'm good at. I specialize in using things in ways their creators never intended. And despite twenty+plus years of hacking, I still use that anthropology degree every day--everything we do needs take into account how organizations and people work--software doesn't operate in a vacuum.

I actually think this forum has been very productive so far. We have a good grasp of the proposed scope of different solutions. We have a start on classifying them. We have an idea of what a requirements list might look like (and every requirements list starts with an impossible set--life is full of tradeoffs).

I don't think we'll see a new protocol come out of this--although those people who are gungho about solutions like that are certainly welcome to try them out in the marketplace.

I would hope, however, that we come out with a good list of the different classes of solutions and what their benefits and drawbacks are. A document of that sort can be a great aid to people who are looking to deploy solutions. I think we may also be able to come up with a set of best practices that, when implemented together, have the effect of limiting the amount of spam people receive. That is a stop gap measure, but in a addition I hope we can come up with a list of potential additions to existing protocols (that will have value even if not implemented 100%) that will help driver spammers into certain behaviors that can more easily be blocked.

It's going to be an incremental process. We have too much invested in the existing infrastructure to just toss it. And nobody wants to throw the baby out with the bath-water. The time to fix the problem wholesale is long gone. So like many systems out there, this one's going to end up with a lot of string and baling wire on it.
--
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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