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

On Thursday, Apr 3, 2003, at 16:43 US/Eastern, Kee Hinckley wrote:
> 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.
Umm, yes, and outside of the special case where you're sending e-mail 
across a corporate network, most e-mail today involves machines 
controlled by different entities separated by a large amount of 
internet under control of neither of them. So what is your point?
> > 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.
Right. Just like right now, I have no control over when someone will 
receive this e-mail. They might poll never, or every five minutes.
>   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.
Someone (possibly you) already mentioned this as a problem, and I 
already pointed out how easy it is to do connection limiting. By IP 
would probably work, and if you require pollers to pass a secret which 
you send them in the first "I have mail for you" message, you could 
limit by recipient too.
> > >   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.
Well, many ISPs feel that the fact that the cost of spam is shifted to 
them rather than the sender *is* a big problem. Feel free to argue it 
out with them.
>   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.
Well, yes, if we could all be given infinite bandwidth and disk space 
for free, there'd be no need to make anyone pay the cost of anything. 
The problem is that in reality, we pay for bandwidth and disk space. 
Today, spam takes up more MB than my actual e-mail, and it's still 
growing. For the majority of people who are on dialup, getting 3MB of 
spam a day is a bandwidth problem.
>   Charging could be a solution.   But it's not the case that someone 
> made a mistake by not requiring it initially.
Oh, when SMTP was devised, it made perfect sense.

> > > 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?
Tell me, what's your POP3 or IMAP timeout set to? What's your HTTP 
timeout set to?
Didn't think so.


mathew

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