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

At 10:06 PM -0500 4/3/03, mathew wrote:
> 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 store and forward--so I don't see the network glitches.  On a 
pull system I do.
> > > 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.
The issue is not when.  The issue is that I don't want every person 
who knows someone at my mail server polling my mail server every five 
minutes to see if there is something new.  That doesn't scale.
> >   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
That doesn't limit the polls.  It just means that instead of aborting 
them with "no mail" I abort them with "come back later".  And if they 
are well behaved, maybe they'll listen to when I tell them to come 
back.  But remember, we're talking about my fetching email from a 
friend here.  You aren't going to tell me to come back in a 
week--even though that might be how often I get email from my friend. 
And I'm not going to set my poll to a week, because I'm not willing 
to have email from my friend arrive a week late.  So you are 
guaranteed that network traffic will be hire than in the current 
situation.
> > 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.
Many ISP feel that the fact that they are reimbursed for the cost of 
receiving email is a problem.  Who pays that cost is a separate 
issue.  But I give up--there's no point in continuing this argument.
> > > > 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.

Wrong timeout.  We're talking about delivering email.  The correct 
question is, "What's the default timeout currently for most email 
servers before they give up trying to send email."  The typical 
answer is four days.
--
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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