Jim,
Saturday, March 29, 2003, 9:32:26 AM, you wrote:
JY> into the morass of consent, well, there are ways to declare consent, and
some
JY> workable-or-not technological solutions have already been stated
...
JY> As for offering consent, well, we've made it pretty far in
JY> civilization with a personal
JY> concept of consent/access in every medium but e-mail, so there are
JY> means.
Given that this is a technical research group, the distinction between
workable and non-workable is rather important. If something is believed
to be unworkable, it is distracting to discuss it.
Noting that other media have developed workable solutions for consent is
extremely important. Assuming that they apply to email is dangerous,
especially when the physical scope of absolute control for email is
uniquely non-existent for so much of email.
JY> I feel the most fruitful activity for
JY> machinery between
JY> message-sender and message-recipient is to help define the character
JY> of the message,
JY> using info known at those places that's not necessarily known at the
JY> recipient end...
1. I do not understand the reference to "known at those places", given that you
then say "not necessarily known at the recipient end".
2. How does it help to rely on the sender's defining the character of
the message, when the senders are non-cooperative rogue players?
JY> And that has nothing to do with consent, except that if I personally
JY> have sense of what
JY> I care to allow, I may encode that policy near me,
Let's assume that there is some way to embody "what you care to allow"
in software and some way to detect whether an incoming piece of email
conforms to what you care to allow. (The heuristics currently required
for such a mechanism are useful but highly flawed.)
This leaves us with the problem of massive bandwidth and processing
being consumed along the path from the sender to your filter. These
resources are not free and they have become a significant problem for
ISPs.
JY> (regretting this reply, because I'll get another annoying message, or
several,
JY> from tim(_at_)mailkey(_dot_)com, who has never seen any of this, and I did
not
JY> _consent_ to be
JY> hounded by his mailserver until I click the link it wants me to click).
And this is a perfect example of why some recipient-based filtering will
remain essential. My own email client let's me easily place an entry
into a special address book and discard all mail from anyone in that
address book...
d/
--
Dave Crocker <mailto:dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
Sunnyvale, CA USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>, <fax:+1.866.358.5301>
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