From: Art Pollard <pollarda(_at_)lextek(_dot_)com>
...
Furthermore, I don't think that this would be / is the norm. I think most
people have a primary e-mail address they tend to work through. True, at
one point, I had about 11 different e-mail addresses but I typically only
worked through one or two of them.
From: Art Pollard <pollarda(_at_)lextek(_dot_)com>
...
A properly designed system would have IMHO added you to the whitelist the
moment that the student you mentioned sent you a message. ...
That is not a good assumption if you look under the covers. My case
is not uncommon, albeit less common than it was 10 or 15 years ago.
As stranger is likely to send mail to vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com but receive a
rseponse from from vjs(_at_)calcite(_dot_)rhyolie(_dot_)com(_dot_)
...
If there were a standard way to do this sort of thing, even while you were
composing the message, your e-mail client could download the challenge
graphic and display it in your message composer. ...
One of the things I am noticing on this list is that there are a number of
ways that we can solve this problem. However, there seems to be resistance
to solving the problem simply because it makes e-mail more complicated in
some way.
I don't agree. Instead I see resistance to solutions that make false
or dubious simplifying assumptions. The clearest example is the assumption
that if we hold all hold our breath, at least 80% of the net or
400,000,0000 people will change instantly their computers and habits.
Other assumptions that are not necessarily true are:
- almost everyone uses a single mailbox, and sends from it.
- strangers who don't speak English will be able to understand your
challenge.
- strangers who speak English but are not technically inclined will
understand or be willing to comply with such a frightening thing
(that's not sarcasm. Many people are literally frightened by
doing new things with computers.)
- strangers will remember having sent you a message and so answer
a challenge instead of assuming that you are just probing for
valid addresses to spam.
- it makes sense to talk about "downloading" a challenge/response
graphic. (think about those who don't use POP, IMAP, or a
webmail scheme)
- strangers will be willing to pay the costs of downloading 5 KBytes
(or more?) of a graphic challenge.
- strangers will value protecting your mailbox from spam enough
to deal with your challenge/response.
I have to wonder, what is easier filling out a challenge / response dialog
in your e-mail client for the several messages that you send per-day to
people who you have never e-mailed before (all the other people you have
communicated with have whitelisted you automatically) or throwing out 70+
spam messages a day.
That makes the false assumption that when other people fill out a
challenge/response dialog, they avoid spam.
It also assumes that manually throwing out 70+ spam messages/day cannot
be avoided except by such a system. That is certainly false today.
My personal filters discard more than 70 messages/day without asking
me, and with a less than 0.1% false positive rate (for any reasonable
definition of false positive).
It also assumes that most users receive more than 70 or even more than
10 or 20 spam/day. My guess (we need numbers) is that most users receive
fewer than 15 messages total per day and fewer than a dozen spam.
No matter what solution we end up choosing, it is going to be more
inconvenient than is currently the case.
That is yet another dubious but not necessarily simplifying assumption.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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