At 04:04 PM 12/5/2004 -0500, Michael Kaplan wrote:
I had imagined a scenario such as what would happen if AOL or some other
large provider made this system standard. Spammers already have a large
bounce rate and they still spam, but what would happened if more than 95%
percent of the emails sent to AOL addresses started to bounce? I suspect
that at this point there would be a financial incentive for spammers to
weed out the invalid addresses. I have read articles how many big time
spammers already routinely weed out invalid addresses, but I am unable to
cite these articles off-hand. I accept that for now I am only able to
make reasonable speculation concerning this point.
(no, most spammers don't really care if an address is valid or not, it's
easier for them to just pump out more spam in the hopes of hitting more
valid ones eventually).
Except AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc, all have their own proprietary systems and
the very idea of a sub-address would not go over very well on these
systems. Sub-address for matt(_at_)AOL? How about matt(_dot_)sub(_at_)AOL? Already
taken? matt(_dot_)sub1(_dot_)sub2(_at_)AOL then? Now try explaining this to their
customers. And start paying for the support calls.
Also these large systems have no incentive to handle bounces from some
non-standard system in a certain special way.
So, anybody running their own mailserver can throw up all kinds of barriers
to receiving mail from normal people, spammers, whatever. Your system
might work great for people that want to use it, they can go sign up for a
"captchamail.com" account and use web based email there.
But, you can't expect large providers to adopt any sort of system like
this. Maybe 1% of the population would be savvy enough to understand
it. On the other hand, if everyone in the world started using SBL+CBL,
that would stop over 90% of the spam to everyone, immediately, with no
effort and very few false positives.
The point is, I personally don't want to create any extra effort for myself
or for my friends in trying to get e-mail to me. If a few spams slip
through, great. But it's not worth me or my friends jumping through a
bunch of extra hoops to avoid it.
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