At 6:21 PM -0500 4/2/03, mathew wrote:
I meant "server" as in physical machine, not "daemon" as in piece of
software. And the point is, both systems are equally useless if the
software or the machine is broken, and both recover as soon as the
software or machine goes up again.
In your system the two machines are controlled by two different
entities and separated by a large amount of internet under control of
neither of them. That is inherently less reliable than two servers
controlled by the same organization on their own network.
Yes. You've mentioned that and I've kind of ignored that. The
thought of everyone polling their all of their regularly
correspondents is incredibly scary. Currently incoming mail comes
when it comes--very efficient. The
It's a tradeoff, like most technical decisions. The automatic
polling frequency could be anything from every second to never. It's
a detail to be
It's a tradeoff that the email "sender" has no control over. It is
controlled by the receiver, who will of course set the polling
frequency as high as they can, since the cost to *them* is low. You
end up with the current volume problem in reverse. The recipients
are abusing the potential senders.
One of the things that might decrease the cost to the receiver is
putting a cost on the sender. That does *not* mean that what is
wrong with the system is that the sender doesn't pay.
On the contrary, I think that that *is* one of the things that's
wrong with the system. I think if the sender had to pay we'd see a
lot less spam. After all, I get a lot less paper junk mail than I
get e-mail spam.
I'm sure that if the sender had to pay we'd see a lot less spam. I'm
also certain that if the sender had to do thirty back flips before
each email message we'd see less spam. That doesn't mean that not
requiring back flips is what's wrong with email. I'm not trying to
be flip here :-), just to point out that I don't see where not
charging the sender more than they already pay for bandwidth is an
inherent problem. Charging could be a solution. But it's not the
case that someone made a mistake by not requiring it initially.
But my client sits there, for days on end, attempting to get that
email, because it doesn't know whether it's from a spammer or from
a flakey ISP.
If you set your timeout to days, yes. And who would do that?
Anyone who didn't want to lose email?
It sits there tieing up resources, slowing down attempts to fetch
other email....
What kind of resource load is an open idle TCP/IP connection on any
remotely modern desktop computer?
One to each spammer machine, plus to each temporarily unavailable
legitimate machine. It's not a problem if the spammers really do go
away and the network connections really are reliable.
--
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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