On Friday, Jun 20, 2003, at 18:21 US/Eastern, gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)com
wrote:
I'm just offering a modest proposal... that
unsolicited, first-contact E-mail be restricted BY DEFAULT from
containing HTML,
attachments, and encoding... and that those restrictions can be
subsequently
lifted by the recipients for senders of their choice. Control, cost
containment, choice, and responsibility.
Well, you've proposed it, and you're free to go on proposing it. But it
seems to me that the consensus on this list is that your proposal won't
work outside of a few fairly narrow social circles.
Also, your proposal does not need any changes to be made for it to be
implemented today. Anyone who wishes to do so can block HTML e-mail.
Most mail clients with reasonable filtering facilities can block HTML
e-mail from unknown senders. If you feel it's a technique that deserves
more popularity, I suggest you write some user-friendly software to
implement it for users who wish to do so.
The same goes for file attachments. In fact, I got so sick of being
sent Windows viruses and worms that I already block all file
attachments that might possibly contain Windows-executable content,
including HTML attachments, Office documents and PIF files. I do this
not because those things are any danger to my system, but because
they're a 100% indicator of spam *for me*. However, I have no illusions
that recommending that Office documents be bounced would *ever* be an
acceptable solution for the Internet in general.
So to summarize: You have an idea, people are already doing it, for
some people it works well, for most people it doesn't, it needs no
changes in any software anywhere, it has zero chance of being an
acceptable recommendation for the Internet in general, and even if we
did recommend it users wouldn't obey the recommendation any more than
they obey the RFCs when quoting URLs.
So I conclude that there's really not much to discuss. So let's just
stop, OK?
mathew
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