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[Asrg] 1. Inventory of Problems - Costs of email

2003-12-23 14:54:23
[Subject changed.]

John R. Levine wrote:
That said, we already know the key flaws in the current MTS. Weak
"trust" model, lack of "authentication", lack of means for
distributing and enforcing recipient policy. ...


The real reason there's e-mail spam is that e-mail by its nature the
costs are mostly borne by the recipient.  Everything else flows from
that.  There's no way to fix that without a top to bottom redesign and
maybe not even then.  (By fix I mean move the actual location of the
costs, not layering on an e-postage scheme that's supposed to
artificially compensate recipients and charge senders.)


An important point to be kept in mind that many of the costs of e-mail are not tangible money costs like postage or e-postage. For example, a lot of email spam is being sent via other people's systems such as open
relays and hacked computers. That means that those resources which have
a certain monetary value are being exploited by spammers for free. Same
goes for forged domains - if they use their own domains, domains costs
money and increase their costs slightly. Even junk mail in the postal
system costs more money aside from postage - it costs money to print,
seal and deliver the envelopes at the post office.

An additional point here is that a lot of the costs are computer resources - it costs money to run and buy filters (IETF's mail server just crashed recently because of additional processing power needed for SpamAssasin). It also costs money to administer anti-spam systems, and configure them, it costs money to use some RBLs and outsourcing the stuff to BrightMail and Postini costs money. On the other hand, the sender does not need to do anything at all - just connect on port 25 and pump the junk in. That's why proposals shifting some of the burdens on the sender such as C/R, Yahoo's DK, LMAP, callbacks, GreyListing, digital certificates, etc. are good, but each come with their own disadvantages and some increase costs for both the sender AND receiver (C/R for ex.).

Yakov
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Yakov Shafranovich / asrg <at> shaftek.org
SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc. / research <at> solidmatrix.com
"All that is gold does not glitter" (LOTR)
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