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Re: [Asrg] Re: Usefulness of wholesale blocking of attachments for SMTP? (Lane Sharman et al)

2004-04-21 01:45:31
Laws are useless unless they are enforced, same for standards.
Everybody else.  There's no need for a central organization if
everybody, individually, decides to enforce the standards.

True as far as it goes.  Unfortunately, for it to be useful with
respect to spam, the standard must be unilaterally enforceable, that
is, enforceable by those who wish to support it even in the presence of
those who wish to subvert it.

Additionally, what happens if a portion of the community colludes
against a specific network or operator?
As in the Usenet Death Penalty?  What happens is that the operator
fixes their problems.

Or, perhaps more likely in the case of spam, sues some perceived point
of focus.

[I]t seems that in many cases ISPs want to have additional mailboxes
or simply do not honor the RFC, [...]

So why are those sites still on the net?

The answer is clear: there is no penalty for violating RFC's, for
abusing the net, or for attacking other net users.  Therefore there
is no negative feedback to minimize these activities.

Fortunately, this is not quite true.  There is negative feedback; it
just is relatively weak in the short and medium term.  The current spam
problem is a transient which will eventually be damped out by the
negative feedback; it's just that that will happen only in the long
term (years, probably many of them).  What I, and the antispammers I
self-identify with, are fighting for, is email that's usable in the
short and medium term.

/~\ The ASCII                           der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML               
mouse(_at_)rodents(_dot_)montreal(_dot_)qc(_dot_)ca
/ \ Email!           7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

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