On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 07:20:49PM -0600, Vernon Schryver wrote:
Unfortunately, I think the vast majority of computer users have absolutely
no idea what HTML is. As a sysadmin, I've tried to explain it to people,
and their eyes glaze over. ....
Yes, but that cuts both ways. I bet most users have no clue
how to tell IE or Netscape how to make a word bold or red.
As I test, I just now tried to get Netscape 7.02 on XP to make a word
bold in a mail message. I cannot find any sign of any way to do such
a thing.
Netscape 7 was written by people like us, who dislike HTML email, so they've
made it non-obvious. But in the business world, nobody uses Netscape for
their email. They use Outlook, which gives you a little toolbar that looks
exactly like your Microsoft Word formatting toolbar, with font size,
bold/italic/underline, colour, etc.
I suspect that most people, if they understood that restrictive permissions
would cause legitimate messages to bounce, would opt for giving full
permissions to all senders.
That is contradicts experience reported by people running retail ISPs.
Many ISPs report almost all of their customers are happy with single
digit false positive rates for 80% reductions in spam loads.
If 70% of people currently use HTML, as Kee Hinckley's numbers suggest, then
the false positive rate will be 70% under the proposed scheme.
Think of what would happen in those 70% of cases. Instead of one message,
there would be at least three (the original HTML mail, the bounce message,
and the plain-text version), and at most five (the original HTML mail, the
bounce message, the request for permission, the acknowledgement of
permission, and then the original HTML mail again). For a proposal that's
meant to decrease the volume of mail and avoid creating disruption, that's
not very satisfactory.
As I keep saying there are those of us whose livelihoods involve
email and who won't tolerate 0.2% false positives and there are
the 100,000,000's of the rest of the Internet for whom not receiving
spam is more important than not hearing from a long lost friend.
Mail from strangers isn't just from long-lost friends. It's ubiquitous in
the corporate world.
The employees of a typical company communicate with employees of many other
companies: clients, suppliers, etc. Employees come and go, and different
projects involve different combinations of companies and different people,
so the set of people that a given individual may receive legitimate mail
from is constantly changing. Consider a sales representative, who may be
contacted by a constantly-changing set of hundreds of people who work at
companies that she is negotiating sales with, or that may be interested in
her company's products. As a sale progresses, more companies (accountants,
lawyers, etc.) are brought in. Similarly for mergers and acquisitions.
That's a lot of people who would be annoyed by bounces.
As for bulk [...] the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouses or the DCC.
Yes, I know, and to me, DCC seems much more pertinent to the task of this
group.
Again, I realize that the DCC is far from perfect. That is one rason
why I've talked about it far less than other things here, and less
than other people have talked about their favorite mechanisms.
So let's talk about it. Could you summarize the problems of DCC (I know one
or two have been mentioned here already)? Perhaps this group could give
some thought to whether those problems could have technical solutions.
Ben
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