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Re: [Asrg] 6. Proposals - Let pull mail replace push mail

2003-09-30 09:05:33
At 11:08 AM +0200 2003/10/01, Dag Kihlman wrote:

 Please search the archives.  This has been discussed before.

        Indeed.

 1. It greatly increases the traffic on the internet.
 If you mean more connections that is true, but if you make a calculation
 you will find that the increased traffic is nill and nothing compared with
 the
 traffic caused by spammers, viruses not to mention radio listners and
 video viewers. Compared with this traffic the traffic argument is not really
 a big thing. Historically the argument is valid but it is getting less and
 less
 interesting.

Additional traffic is not the only problem. What was a single e-mail message is now a message body that has to be stored somewhere reliable, plus a notification to the recipients that they can come pick up their e-mail at such-and-such location. What was a single e-mail message now has two parts, which increases by an order of magnitude (or more) the problems with things breaking down and getting disconnected or mis-directed.

Now all spammers would have to do is to compromise a mail silo server somewhere, replace all the message bodies with their spam content, and they can be assured that this will get past all the recipient filters because the original notices that went out were real e-mail messages from real people.

In addition, if you've ever built a large-scale mail system, you know that the single biggest problem facing you is not disk storage capacity, but is disk I/O latency, especially with small messages. You're talking about taking all traffic and turning it into a message upload plus one or more small messages. This is the worst possible thing you could do to the mail system.


If you want to invent the Mail-Merge Transport Protocol, talk to Eric Allman and Bryan Costales. We went a long ways towards designing this thing while I was at AOL and Bryan was at MercuryMail/InfoBeat.

Problem was, we realized that this would increase the spam problem by many orders of magnitude -- spammers already use tools that send the message body once and then a list of recipients to which to spam that message to, we'd just be allowing them to push that mechanism to the end recipient.


See the archives. Please don't make blind proposals like this without having reviewed what proposals have already been made, and have some suggestions for how you're going to address the problems previously identified.

--
Brad Knowles, <brad(_dot_)knowles(_at_)skynet(_dot_)be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
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