I maintain a number of mailing lists which the members of various
(non-technical) organizations use to communicate with each other. The
volume of legitimate HTML email on these lists is quite high.
In that case, obviously it would be straightforward to the recipients on your
lists to enable HTML-burdened messages coming from those relevant lists.
Programmers and sysadmins, and people who started using email before MIME
was introduced, tend to dislike HTML email. Other people see the ability to
use boldface and italics as normal features of any text-editing environment
(which they consider their MUA to be). They would find the idea of
suppressing those features simply bizarre. When writing a document that is
going to be printed, whether we use Microsoft Word or LaTeX, we can put the
title of a book in italics; people have come to expect that the same is true
when they write email.
If you want FULL text-handling features, then you can send LaTeX or Word (or
whatever) documents as attachments (and thus enable attachments) for those
people you trust to send you that kind of material.
But for most users, they don't want to receive a 60K attached .DOC file which
contains a 1500-byte unsolicited spam message, and where the primary advantage
of the format is that the .DOC file confuses the user's content filter set up
to
block spam.
Again, the only people who would have a problem under my scheme are those who
HAVE NOT MADE ARRANGEMENTS WITH THE USER to receive mail of that sort. Getting
permission to send it would allow future exchanges with those correspondents to
continue the same way they always have.
As for attachments, nowadays, many people have digital cameras and
high-speed Internet connections, and like to send photos to their friends
via email. It is no use telling these people that 'sending large attachments
is poor netiquette'; they and their friends have the requisite bandwidth,
and it doesn't bother them.
Again, no problem once they've made arrangements with their recipients to
receive such stuff. Just don't send it unsolicited, without permission, and
everything is fine.
My own view is that these issues are red herrings. Spam is spam whether it
consists of an ASCII text file or a JPEG. Effective anti-spam measures
should stop spam regardless of its format.
Would be nice, although I propose that NOTHING I've seen would comprise a
silver
bullet that would ACTUALLY stop 100% of all spam before it was sent. Do you
know of one? What I am proposing, though, would put a BIG dent in it, cheaply,
and without requiring a redesign of the whole Internet E-mail system. AND it
would eliminate the great majority of worms/viruses/trojans in the process, too.
Do you know anything else that would be so effective, so cheap, so easily and
quickly implemented, and with as little disruption to ALL established
legitimate
users of the Net?
Gordon Peterson http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002 Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support the Anti-SPAM Amendment! Join at http://www.cauce.org/
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg