You have mentioned before that even if only ASCII spam is being delivered
that will reduce the overall bandwidth consumer. HOWEVER, that will not
reduce the total number of spam items in someone's inbox.
First, people's inbox capacity is never (in my experience) limited by
number of
messages... always by number of megabytes.
End users care much more about the number of messages they have to delete,
than number of megabytes the inbox takes especially in the age of large
hard drives and broadband connections.
I'm not talking about their local Outlook/OutlookExpress/Eudora/etc Inbox, I'm
talking about their limited-size ISP-provided POP3 mailboxes... the ones which
overflow and cause their important mail to bounce.
If you will be away from the office for days/weeks/months and unable to devote
your usual attention to E-mails (say, a transpacific ocean voyage, which I did
a
year or two ago) these issues can become VERY important.
Also, I contend that they're generally less concerned with _number_ of spam
messages they receive, exactly, than they are with the aggregate amount of time
they have to devote to dealing with them. If there were some five-second way
of
dealing with them en masse and with confidence, whether there had been ten of
them or ten thousand of them would ITSELF matter relatively little. (All other
things being equal, and issues of ISP inbox limitations and overflow blocking
and download time aside).
Second, if spammers are unable to pull a lot of the tricks and deceptions
that
they do at present, I believe that a lot of spam that presently "works"
economically will no longer be viable.
Agreed but the very nature of spam has nothing to do with HTML tricks -
True, but the use of those HTML tricks is by itself a good "indicator" of
likely
spam, since few people but spammers seem to ever use them in E-mail.
For example, I don't think I've ever seen a case of an innocent, legitimate
E-mail that legitimately needed or used Javascript. And certainly nothing that
you'd want to receive from someone you didn't know, and that you hadn't
developed an understanding with regarding that form of E-mail messages.
it has to do with "how spammers amplify their distribution channels while
keeping costs nearly at zero" in Barry Shain's words.
Again, those trojans are propagated and installed primarily either by scripting
and/or attachments. Restricting those e-mail features by default on a
"need-to-use" basis will eliminate at least the great majority of such stuff.
I think that we had plenty of arguments both ways, and both camps are
staying were they are. I would suggest that either you or someone else,
write up a BCP or RFC, plus create some working code and get back to the
group.
I'd be glad to collaborate with someone wishing to proceed with something more
formal, particularly if there is funding for the effort.
Not that I am advocating the banning of HTML...
Nor am I, although I'd like to see a lot of the pointless and gratuitous use of
it in E-mails come to an end. The waste is particularly annoying and egregious
in spam, where you don't want the crap to begin with.
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.
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