Re: [Asrg] email pull (was RE: Authentication )

At 7:27 PM -0500 3/29/03, mathew wrote:
> > But it's not email.  It doesn't have a number of the necessary 
> > attributes for person-to-person email.
> > - it requires a server that is up all the time
> So does conventional e-mail. With current e-mail systems, I fail to 
> get the mail if my messaging server (at my ISP) is down. With e-mail 
> pull, I fail to get the mail if the sender's messaging server (at 
> his ISP) is down. In addition, I won't get mail from people I don't 
> know that I need to poll unless my messaging server at my ISP is up. 
> A small tradeoff in reliability, but one I think I'd take to cut 
> spam.
Currently you have a single point of failure that is close to you on 
the network.  It's down infrequently, and when it is, you simply wait 
and it comes up.
With pull you are relying on the availability of dozens, hundreds or 
even thousands (depending on how much email you get) of different 
servers scattered across the world.  You go from a situation where 
all of your email is there most of the time, to one where some of 
your email is never there most of the time.
> I mean, the web often requires that both my ISP and the appropriate 
> web site have their servers operational when I want to read a web 
> page. Yet people still use the web.
Different expectations of service, and different scale.  I get mail 
from far more servers than I surf in a given day.
> > - it requires storing outgoing email for an indefinite amount of time
> The current system requires storing incoming e-mail for an 
> indefinite amount of time.
Nope.  Only until the end user picks it up.

> Both of these are the whole point of the system. The whole idea is 
> to move the storage, uptime and network requirements to the sender's 
> messaging server, so that it's easier to take action against abuse, 
> and so that server operators suffer direct consequences if they fail 
> to secure their systems.
I understand that that is the goal.  However you need to look not 
just at what it does to spammers, but what it does to normal mail 
users.  And what it does in that case is make email delivery less 
reliable.
> > - it completely the destroys the go-online, fetch, go-offline model
> Not really. It just means that my mail client would go online, fetch 
> my e-mail from a dozen different systems instead of just one, then 
> disconnect.
No. You go online.  Get a list of different email systems, decide 
which ones you  want to fetch, and then go online again to fetch them.
And that points out the biggest flaw of the system.  Not only have 
you not stopped the spammers (sure, they need to find a host 
somewhere, or lots of hosts, but that's not that big a deal).  But 
you've made it *way* harder for me to tell whether something is spam. 
The initial "you have mail" message doesn't provide enough 
information.  I can no longer use content filters on it.  Instead I 
have to go try and fetch it.  The spammer is sure to have an 
overloaded server, so now I'm not only going to try and fetch it--but 
try multiple times!
--
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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