Bill Cole wrote:
This is really getting back to what some people (including me) have been
saying for a long time: the solution to spam cannot come from more
engineering, because the problem is not a technical one. Restricting
broadcast email (by which I mean messages sent via SMTP) is not all that
difficult, and there are working examples of systems that do an
extremely effective job of it. Unfortunately, broadcast email is not
currently all spam, so whacking broadcast email altogether would be a
bad thing. If the *social* change can be effected of getting
non-spammers who now use SMTP for broadcasting to use other available
mechanisms like RSS, the technical aspects of eliminating the spam (i.e.
all broadcast email that can't migrate to RSS or some other pure-pull
mechanism) are not quite trivial, but are certainly straightforward.
Bringing in another subthread to this: the advantage of ordaining RSS as
the preferred protocol/medium for one-way or heavily asymmetric
broadcasting (i.e. most marketing and news materials) as well as for
guided/led/facilitated discussions (i.e. like most weblogs that take
reader comments) and NNTP as the preferred mode for multi-way ownerless
discussion group is that unlike the approach of building an all-new mail
protocol or hacking more extensions onto SMTP, there isn't a new
protocol needing a flag day, and early adopters can get a benefit. As
proof, note that we have people making the move away from SMTP mail NOW
because of the fallout from the spam wars. Spamcop runs a news server,
not a listserver. Blog sites offer users updates via RSS, not email
notification.
Do you think that we can get some folks together and produce an
evaluation document outlining the pros and cons? This would be very
useful for further discussion.
Yakov
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Yakov Shafranovich / PGP Key: 0x10D051E6 / www.shaftek.org
SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc. / www.solidmatrix.com
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Lord
Acton)
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