If no-one is using (receiving) email, why will the spammers
send it?
At that extreme, they won't. Then people will start using email
again, because there's no spam. Then the spammers will attack again.
Repeat until you regurgitate. This isn't difficult to figure out...
Ahh... hyperbole. But that's only one possible extrapolation of the
dynamics of the problem.
Spammers will increase the volume of their traffic until they are
just barely more than breaking even. That's guaranteed. I'll bet
money that the number of people using email then will be lower than it
is today, and that those people will have massively increased costs
for their SMTP infrastructure.
It's a problem in co-evolution really isn't it? Like a host/parasite thing.
A parasite that kills its host is a poor parasite. A host that expends
resources it can't afford in fighting the parasite will probably die of
something else.
I still believe it's substantially true,
though. The vast majority of people will simply give up on email once
spam becomes too much trouble to deal with. I'll include ISP's in
that, too.
I'm not certain of this.
Then what? We'll probably have SMTP for people willing to put up
with the deluge of spam, and eventually a new, non-spammy protocol for
people who have gotten frustrated with the "fingers in the ears"
attitude towards changing SMTP. But for a long period, there will be
duplicate email systems, and massive political fights.
Maybe. I don't know, it may be that the problem is self-limiting.
As spam gets worse, imperfect "solutions" are deployed which keep the
amount of spam *seen* just about at a minor nuisance level. In which case,
the pressure to produce a radical solution is never strong enough to
justify the cost, no matter how elegant and technically attractive it is.
This is just another possible extrapolation of spam dynamics.
I'm not sure it's true either.
Equally, external factors (some change in legislation perhaps, sudden
popular shift to some form of Instant Messaging) may
change the way things develop.
Let's face it, SMTP (as it was in the 1980's) is irrevocably dead.
Spam has killed it, and we need to accept that fact. Whether the new
non-spammy protocol is SMTP++, or something else, is irrelevant. We
need to do *something* more than believe that SMTP was created by God,
and that anyone changing it will be cursed forever.
It's clear that spammers depend on features of SMTP and the nature of the
network. Many anti-spam proposals are effectively new protocols (with more
handshaking, authentication etc) *layered* on SMTP. Some mechanisms
(e.g. use of "blackhole" lists) effectively modify the connectedness of
the network. The advantage of doing things in these ways, rather than
replacing SMTP or creating private networks is that you can more easily be
backward compatible, don't rely on universal deployment and can
deliver (in many cases) now (or soon). Of course, they're not likely to be
perfect. They may not address all the aspects of the problem, just the ones
that the people who pay care enough about.
That said, if and when the SMTP++BONE (or whatever) is created I'll be
happy to try to convince my boss that we should hook up to it. Let's hope
it's not too expensive.
--
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg