On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 12:42:19AM -0500, John R Levine wrote:
They don't have to change their address. The "send me spam" address could
easily be in addition to their original address, e.g.,
fred(_at_)isp(_dot_)com would
add fred(_at_)sendmespam(_dot_)isp(_dot_)com(_dot_) Since the sendmespam
mailbox would always be
over quota, you'd want to keep it separate for practical reasons anyway.
Ah. This may be the source of disagreement. You are assuming perhaps that
the reason people would not want a policy decided for them is because they
want spam? I can't say I have run into anybody that wants spam -- for
their definition of it.
There are several reasons why people would want individual choice.
The primary one would be they don't agree with the particular program
and definitions decided upon. Particularly ones that might affect non-bulk
mail as those who use the term UCE have been known to suggest.
There are also those who simply defend the principle of individual choice,
and don't want to make decisions for others when it comes to something
as fundamental to a free society as blocking communications. Even when
an immense majority are likely to agree with a choice, or will take it if
it is all that were offered.
And since we know that the people who don't want spam vastly outnumber the
ones who do, it's reasonable to design a system that makes the common case
easy while making the uncommon case possible, just like it's possible to
Except we live in a society where permitting communications, especially
unsolicited communications, is the default. It's more than that it's a
hard-fought for and hard-won right. It wasn't discarded over things vastly
more important than spam in the grand scheme. However, to get into this
debate, I would point to the long history of policy making on this issue,
but this is really not the place. Nonetheless the history is strongly in
favour of rejecting proposals which whould, in practice cause almost everybody
to adopt the same policy.
Right. How does giving server operators the option to publish a NO UBE
policy force a policy decision on them? For the 99.99999999% of server
operators and their users who don't want spam they publish a standard NO
UBE banner. For toad.com, they don't. It's up to them.
This is where it gets messy. As noted, this approach very stronly encourages
only domain-wide policy. Then it has to deal with the questions of what
policies can be expressed. If you go to very simple policies like only a
tag that means "No UBE" with some definition agreed on to the parameters of
that, then people can have only a binary choice of policy. If you make a
more complex policy language, you make it more complex for senders. My earlier
drafts had the ability to specify expressions like "No mail if total unsolicited
recipients > N" and the like. But I didn't find an easy middle ground.
But mostly I abandoned this course because I didn't see how it would actually
be effective. However, we can certainly draft how to do it if it could
become effective.
Could you list two or three ISPs that let users send spam through their
outgoing mail servers? Or for that matter, who let retail users send bulk
I can name many ISPs who let users send what _some_ people include in their
definition of spam. This, actually, is why I have argued without much luck
for finding the "intersection" definition of spam that still covers almost
all spam but is narrow so that everybody can agree it's spam.
In the absence of laws, as ineffective as any other opt-out proposal.
With a federal law, I'd expect it to be about as effective as the TCPA,
which hasn't eradicated junk faxes but has kept them down to a level that
keeps our fax machines usable.
I would rate the TCPA as highly ineffective. I have gone to court with
TCPA lawsuits, and even won and even collected the $500 damages. It was
not a productive use of my time.
By the way, do you think the TCPA should be repealed? It means that even
if you're willing to change your phone number, you can't get one where
junk faxes are permitted.
We can discuss that offline if you like, but I believe the recorded voice
robodialer portion of the TCPA is mostly constitutional. The do-not-call
list portion is useless and being replaced. I got lots of junk faxes when
I had an open fax.
However, again, there is almost nobody who wants junk fax (by their definition)
and nobody who wants spam (by their definition.) The problem with a
binary policy flag is that it effectively applies the same policy decision
to all, and I believe policy decisions should rest with the individual, and
nobody's mail should be blocked in a way they don't wish it to be blocked.
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