ietf-asrg
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Re: [Asrg] Spam, defined, and permissions

2004-12-24 19:39:34
Email should be changed so that the contents of a email lives on the
sender's server until it is retrieved by the recipient.

That was suggested a long time ago.  It works OK for lots of
situations, but not so well for legitimate senders without full-time
servers.

Hmmm... that last phrase ALMOST sounds like an oxymoron...!  Care to explain?

The whole point of the change would be to FORCE senders to cover more of the 
costs of (and responsibility for) what they send, and that might in fact 
INCLUDE 
the need to provide (or pay an ISP to provide) precisely such 24/7 E-mail 
message storage, until the messages were picked up by the recipient.  Shifting 
those costs back to the sender is NOT entirely unreasonable, in principle.

The earlier comment about how the recipient would identify themself to the 
sender-end message storage server is a more interesting one, although it 
strikes 
me that they could be given a stub kind of E-mail ("there is an e-mail message 
waiting for you, here's the IP address you need to contact, and the cookie you 
need to provide to retrieve it").  At least THAT kind of an approach wouldn't 
require a wholesale re-engineering of the E-mail system;  you could, perhaps, 
implement it ENTIRELY within the sender E-mail server, at least until recipient 
mail client software made the secondary body-fetch automatic and transparent.  

The key downside that I see is more from the standpoint of privacy/security, 
where the recipient may not relish the idea of revealing to the sender EXACTLY 
when they retrieved and read the message, or from where.

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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