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Re: [Asrg] NNTP IS Pull, deal with it

2003-04-26 14:35:53
Vernon Schryver <vjs(_at_)calcite(_dot_)rhyolite(_dot_)com> wrote:
If that were true, then current Internet email would also be a "Pull system."
In fact the only way individual users decide whether to "pull a message
onto their personal machine" is with a protocol that is distinct from
the netnews server-to-server protocol, and that corresponds to POP.  

  For POP, not for other mail systems (local mboxes, etc.)

  Part of the difference between SMTP and NNTP spam may be historical,
and due to implementation choices in the servers.  NNTP is obviously
one-to-many for messages, so it makes sense to store only one copy,
and to distribute that as needed.  STMP is generally one-to-one, so
when a single message is sent to multiple users, it's often stored
multiple times.  So NNTP spam can be deleted one, for many users, and
SMTP spam can't.

  i.e. mbox's don't support per-message "soft links" to a central
database, where known spam can be deleted post-facto.  POP and NNTP
hide the server implementation of message storing, which makes it
easier for them to deal with the problem.

  This feature makes NNTP cancels much simpler to implement locally,
and therefore much more likely to be useful, and used.

Netnews spam mitigation is not based on merely deleting messages on
individual servers but on "cancelling" messages.  That cancelling
affects spam on news servers even before it reaches the servers.  It
is true that article files are deleted, but the same could be done
to spam mail in some implementations of mailboxes.

  So it's not just SMTP, or the specific implementations that
contribute to the problem, but their interaction which magnifies the
likelihood of SMTP spam being worse than other protocols.

  Alan DeKok.
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