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RE: [Asrg] Thoughts so far

2003-03-19 19:20:23
At 2:35 PM -0800 3/19/03, Steve Schear wrote:
For others, who cannot or will not take the extra time/effort, I think I can live without their communication.

There speaks someone who clearly never wants to talk to his mother-in-law.
That's not a bug, it's a feature!  Email as an intelligence test!

At 2:35 PM -0800 3/19/03, Steve Schear wrote:
The business plan for creating something brand new is *way* different than the plan for replacing something in use by hundreds of millions of people.
...

Look at Kazaa. It takes extra effort to install and learn but 10s of millions have done so because they see

Yes. Now read what I said again and pick an example that actually counters it instead of supporting it.


At 2:14 PM -0800 3/19/03, Steve Schear wrote:
You keep missing the issue. This is nothing like being armed. A gun works whether or not anyone else has one. Sender pays works *only* if a significant proportion of the users have one.

A PoW system could be deployed almost immediately at a web-based email system.

What does this have to do with my statement?

Past that I really don't care if they can or cannot contact me. I can live with that. A bit of balkenization might be desirable, even necessary, to coerce a change.

You're right. Balkanization may be necessary to coerce change. If people discover that they cannot communicate with their friends, the businesses that they buy things from, and the periodicals that they read, they most certainly will switch systems. I'm glad we both agree on that. Now please apply that logic to your initial deployment. Let's say you manage to persuade 5% of the population (I'm being generous) to use your system at first release. Which do you think will be coerced to change? The 5% that adopted your system initially, or the 95% that didn't?

At 2:13 PM -0500 3/19/03, Paul Judge wrote:
2.      must not affect delivery(latency, integrity, cost, reliability) of
wanted messages to a point that would effect the normal use of email
3.      must be easy to use
4.      must be easy to deploy, incrementally
        a.      must provide incentives to deploy for those doing the
deployment
5.      must not depend on universal deployment to be effective
7.      must have minimal administration and implementation overhead
8.      must have minimal computational and bandwidth overhead
...it has serious problems with those requirements.

I don't accept number 8 as being necessary.

Okay.  How do you respond to 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7?

I don't think postage requires a universal acceptance off the bat. If it works for me, that's all I care. Progress occurs when a small, but

Please explain how it works for you when nobody else is using it.

influential group, adopt some new technology or behavior which is beneficial to them. As other's notice the advantages they too will see if it can work

Yes. That is true. Please explain what the advantages are when only a small group is using it.

for them. I like Freenet and other P2P systems. I don't care if they are not universal.

Absolutely. So long as they have a critical mass, they are useful. How are you going to get a critical mass?

At the early adopter stage you aren't forcing unknown senders to spend more time and money--you're forcing the users of the system to spend time and money. The unknown senders aren't using the system. And you can't block them because they constitute the majority of your correspondents.

No they do not. I'll white list all my current correspond ants all others are, ifso facto, unknown senders. My .sigs will inform respondents on lists how to contact me in the same way people sometimes use intentional ill-formed email addresses to thwart harvesting.

So, you agree that in the early stages your system is a combination of whitelisting and challenge/response.

Now take a user looking for an anti-spam system.  He can install two systems.
1. A whitelisting and challenge/response system.
2. A whitelisting and challenge/response system that makes his correspondents install special software and makes it more difficult and expensive for him to send email.

Why will he install #2?


Again, you've skipped to the "everyone has it" stage. Take that person currently facing the pain of having to change their address. You say to them, "Here, instead of changing your address. Install this system. It will take longer to send your email (or cost you money to send), and it won't stop any spam right now.

It will stop spam and all unknown senders immediately.

Sure. If you're willing to manually whitelist all your correspondants and/or use a challenge/response system. But that has nothing to do with the feature that you are pushing--sender-pays.

Stop telling me how it's going to stop spam when everyone is using it. I believe you! Tell me how you're going to convince people to use it in the first place.

For those who cannot or will not accept this aspect its not for them until it approaches more universal acceptance.

Okay, now I think we may be approaching understanding. All you need to realize is that the number of people who will decide "its not for them" is greater than the number who won't. Therefore, you'll never approach universal acceptance. Therefore it's a dead-end.

And at this point I give up on my end of this discussion. If you aren't persuaded now, I suggest you go start a software company selling end user software (find a good area to tackle--something where Microsoft is giving away their product for free, for instance--and sell something that doesn't interoperate with other software in the area) and we can pick up this discussion in ten years or so when you've had some experience trying to sell software to end-users who already have a solution that sucks, but basically works.

But thank's for the discussion. You have changed my opinion of sender-pays. I've gone from thinking that it's an interesting concept to thinking it's a complete waste of time.
--
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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