The well-put good design principles notwithstanding, a troublesome and
unfortunate thorn here is that of the scale of the problem.
Today, worldwide email traffic is (very) roughly 10 billion messages a
day, or at least close enough to that for me to make my point. Of that
there's good evidence that half or more is actually spam.
If all this spam were detected and bounced (or even a substantial
fraction), then we're looking at *significant* increase in the overall
volume of email, at least in the short term until spam disappears :-).
And, to the extent that not all sites are evenly affected, the increase
in burden of outbound traffic (and the attendant hardware, bandwidth,
electricity, etc) is exacerbated.
For many sites, these consequences would be a significant impediment to
them adopting a non-bounce approach, at least for mail which is
determined with very high probability to be spam.
Bob
-----Original Message-----
From: asrg-admin(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org [mailto:asrg-admin(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On
Behalf Of Brad
Templeton
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2003 8:49 PM
To: Vernon Schryver
Cc: asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: [Asrg] Ban the bounce; improved challenge-response systems
Rejoining the list after a week off for a conference (where I gave a
nice
talk on spam issues, among other things) let me add that while I doubt
we can get rid of bounces -- no well designed software system drops
traffic
on the floor without informing the interested parties (except if that is
part of the design, as in UDP) -- but we can make them easier to handle
for honest mailing lists.
[...]
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