On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 02:23:54AM -0500, gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)com wrote:
Unfortunately, I think the vast majority of computer users have absolutely
no idea what HTML is.
All the more reason they shouldn't triple to quintuple the carrying cost of
their E-mail due to using it inadvertently.
That's a techie's point of view. It's like saying, 'people shouldn't
inadvertently use incorrect device drivers', or 'people shouldn't
inadvertently use systems that send passwords in cleartext'. Those are
issues that the vast majority of people can't be expected to understand or
sort out for themselves. They rightly expect vendors to take care of all
such matters for them.
The bounceback message could refer them to a Web site which would explain the
problem, and explain how to turn off HTML formatting for the most popular
E-mail
clients.
In corporate environments, there are a lot of busy managers who expect
everything to 'just work' -- immediately. On receiving your proposed bounce
message, the irate recipient gets on the phone to his IT department, and
demands to know why he has to go off and read some technical web site just
to send an email. This is a recipe for chaos.
And in case you're thinking of suggesting that the IT department configure
everyone's MUA to send plain text by default, keep in mind that this would
place a huge burden on IT departments, which are already straining to keep
everyone's virus checkers up to date. Moreover, it wouldn't help in the
case where the irate manager is trying to send a PowerPoint document.
An anti-spam system should be as non-intrusive as possible; I think we can
do better than this.
IF she does that (and doing so ought to produce a CLEAR warning that it will
hugely increase the amount of spam she receives) then AT LEAST the spam
monkey
is off the back of Sally's ISP, and she can't legitimately bitch about
getting a
lot of spam... since SHE made the CONSCIOUS CHOICE to defeat the anti-spam,
anti-worm, anti-virus provisions offered.
It means that the alternative on offer gave her no satisfactory option.
Again, our task here is to do better than that.
A *vanishingly* small percentage of "legitimate" messages from
unknown/untrusted
senders NEED to have HTML, attachments, or encoded text bodies.
The concept of need isn't relevant here. People use email because they want
to, not just because they need to. The infrastructure exists because
they're willing to pay for it, not because they need it. We are here to
come up with proposals that users will accept, not to impose our own tastes
on users.
As for "bulk", I don't think that's automatically a behavior of spammers...
The word 'bulk' appears in most definitions of spam I've seen.
indeed, more and more spam I've seen is individually created for each user
(for
example, having the recipient's name or e-mail address or at least their
dowmin
name somewhere in the spam).
It's still bulk mail, it's just 'personalized'. I understand that there are
ways of coping with this when counting mail to see whether it's 'bulk';
would someone more familiar with those techniques care to comment?
Ben
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