I've experimented with many alternative message systems to email,
some of which used pull, though not quite the way you describe.
It's not clear to me that spam goes away just because it's pull,
though it might make it easier to track down the (ir)responsible.
For example, Suppose you got an email that said;
"You have a message from bob(_at_)example(_dot_)com waiting for you at
http://example.com/bob.message.127";.
When go to the web page, it's an ad for wonder widgets.
In that case, I think most would still classify it as spam
even though you have to go to a web site and "pull" the message.
I wouldn't see the pull mechanism being quite what you describe. I'd see
it much more similar to NNTP in how it works from the client. The client
would occasionally poll the server and download any new messages that
originate from that mailing list's server. The mailing lists server could
optionally send out a message to the clients on the mailing list letting
them know that a new message has arrived. The message would simply be an
administrative message and not shown to the user.
There are several advantages to this:
1) You subscribed to the mailing list and your client goes out to get the
messages. Unsubscribing would simply be a matter of telling your client to
not picking up the messages any longer. Mailing lists wouldn't really be a
subscription like they have in the past where the message is sent to a
certain subset of people. Instead, mailing lists would simply be composed
of those who tell their clients to pick up messages on a regular or
semi-regular basis.
2) The moderator to the mailing list could remove the messages from the
message stream fairly easily or even from the archives to prevent off-topic
or spam messages from being downloaded. Users could even remove their
previous posts if they choose given proper authentication.
3) Messages would not have to be picked up frequently or on any regular
basis. I get a number of mailing lists that I look at very rarely and only
use for reference or for interest (if I have any time to read it.) It
would be easy for someone to tell their client to pick up messages once a
week or once a month if they choose.
-Art
--
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.
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