There was some more fundamental (but probably premature)
discussion of "consent" early in the life this group.
The charter goes on and on about consent, however aside from Gordon's HTML
blocking thread, there has been no discussion of that.
I think that my approach, with sender/recipient-pair-based permissions list and
a (perhaps multi-stage) transition strategy as I suggested would clearly make a
big reduction in spam volume (bytes at least), and the system is simple enough
that users could understand and deal with it.
I think it's a big bonus that it (the SAME mechanism) also would take a big
chunk out of viruses/worms/trojans (and I spent the last half of today
disinfecting three systems at one of my consulting clients... all three systems
had multiple infections of Bugbear and Klez... several variants of each).
I also like the fact that my approach doesn't require a global consensus or
even
a "standard" for how to implement it. It can be implemented on an ISP-by-ISP
basis incrementally.
If discussion of consent is premature at the moment,
Why would it be "premature" if in fact it is the MOST practical, the MOST
effective, the MOST implementable and the MOST comprehensible of the proposals
we've been discussing?
what should we be looking at right now?
I think we should be looking at (1) finding ISPs interested in pursuing
implementation of early prototypes of these systems, and (2) discussing the
idea
with Microsoft and AOL and Netscape, as those three companies have the most to
do with the defaulting to sending bulky HTML-burdened E-mail.
In general, what directions should the group be pursuing at the moment? As
it appears rights now, there are mainly various discussions about
everything under the sun, but no concrete sense of direction at all.
*I* certainly have a sense of direction.
But again, we can *expect* that getting concurrence is going to be like herding
cats... that's precisely why I feel we *must* have a scheme which can be
implemented WITHOUT requiring standards or global consensus. I just don't
think
we should expect to have that.
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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