At 10:05 PM -0500 3/31/03, mathew wrote:
The question is how the reliability of a pull-based system would
compare to the reliability of the current system. Don't forget that
although email pull would degrade my ability to receive mail from
users whose messaging servers are badly maintained, it would
*increase* my ability to *send* mail to those
No, because SMTP already takes care of that with store/forward and
retry. And besides, you still need to send them the notification
that they have a message.
Different expectations of service, and different scale. I get mail
from far more servers than I surf in a given day.
Maybe you should try an RSS feed reader. :-)
I have.
The current system requires storing incoming e-mail for an
indefinite amount of time.
Nope. Only until the end user picks it up.
Uh, that's an indefinite amount of time. I might not log in to
collect my mail for several months.
In both the current setup and e-mail pull, the server holding the
mail can stop holding it once the recipient has downloaded it.
What's the difference?
The difference is that the receiver knows the rules. Their ISP tells
them what their limits are, how how long they will hold mail. If
they go on vacation they can make appropriate arrangements. You've
replaced that with a system where the limits are different with each
of your correspondents, and furthermore, the sender now has to pay
the storage costs if some of their recipients are on vacation.
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.
If the decision process is fast enough--and it probably will
be--then you just have a dual-threaded e-mail client. Most offline
newsreaders work that way--download the headers, autoselect a bunch
of articles on the fly, and download those articles, then
disconnect. All in one cycle.
So pull is automatic with no user filtering, but...
And that points out the biggest flaw of the system. Not only have you not
Which is a big problem why? It's not going to chew up your
bandwidth, you can set retrieval timeouts as short as you want to
limit your dialup session to, and the CPU and disk overhead of
failing to make a connection is minimal. I'd make that payoff to get
rid of most spam.
what do you mean it won't chew up my bandwidth? Spammer sends notice
of email. I automatically download the spam. Where is this a win?
You are assuming that the spam will dry up because they can't find a
hosting provider? I'll agree that it's valuable to try and drive
them to that point, and that it will help. But I don't think that a)
that will be sufficient, and b) that a whole new system is necessary
and c) that a system that makes spam detection harder is a good idea.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.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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