Re: [Asrg] Spam, defined, and permissions

> Somebody wrote, among other things, about how much storage space spam was
costing them.

> Email should be changed so that the contents of a email lives on the
sender's server until it is retrieved by the recipient.

> It shifts the storage costs to the sender, especially the big sender, and
forces some kind of accountability onto the sender and/or the sender's ISP.
An email with foged headers to non-existent servers will not be read.

It's certainly an intriguing enough idea, and certainly would focus the 
attention (and the storage cost) on the SENDER of spams (or their ISP) rather 
than on the recipients.  But (and it's a big 'but') the fact of the matter is 
that it's a bit late to talk about making global changes in the world's E-mail 
infrastructure philosophy (and that's what it would take).

> It does break the much-revered model that makes the Internet resistant to a
Nuclear Attack...

Odd comment... I don't see, honestly, how it would make any big difference.  
Where the mail is stored, between the time it's sent and the time it's picked 
up 
by the final destination (and let's agree here for the time being that we're 
talking about the ISP-hosted mail servers here that ARE presumed to be online 
full-time, rather than user machines which are less likely to be) really 
doesn't 
change the issue of nuclear attack vulnerability... that's more an issue of the 
network being largely host-free and able to [re]route connections in real time 
around points of failure, and those capabilities aren't really changed by mail 
server architecture, or distance between user machines and mail storage servers.

> ...but spam (and its sisters - worms and viruses) pose a greater
danger than the threat of Nuclear War.

I don't know that I agree with that one, either.  More LIKELY, maybe (since the 
LIKELIHOOD of spam, as a clear and PRESENT danger, at 100% is hard to exceed) 
although certainly the COST (lives, money, economic catastrophe) associated 
with 
a nuclear war would certainly be far more devastating than spammers are likely 
to achieve anytime soon...!

Gordon Peterson                  http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002  Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support free and fair US elections!  http://stickers.defend-democracy.org
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.



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