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Re: [Asrg] Re: Charging for e-mail

2006-02-12 17:45:20

Here's an alternative perspective on the problem
http://www.vanquish.com//news/letter_0206.shtml

more detail:
http://www.vanquish.com/sb1/goodmail_indepth.htm


The problem with these sorts of articles is that they are not "perspectives". They are rants. Frankly, I am rather tired of them.

They ignore current facts and they ignore trade-offs in trying to deal with a serious problem. So, instead, they focus on creating a sense of fear and even hysteria.

It's not that a mechanism like certified mail cannot be abused. Rather, it is that there is a legitimate spectrum of uses for vetting mechanisms -- as there is for any interesting technique -- and articles like these distract us from serious consideration of them.

At the moment, certified mail has been declared to be intended for the sending of transactional mail, not marketing mail. That is, mail that both the originator and the recipient engage in prior consent and consider to be business-critical, for getting delivered.

Forgive me, but I happen to think that a mechanism that will improve deliverability of transactional mail is a sufficiently Excellent Thing so as to be entirely uncontroversial.

(I have an entirely different line of comments about using a proprietary mechanism and only one vetting agency -- nevermind the use of per-message charting -- but for that, we would have to get into *my* rant.)

So if folks want to have a serious discussion about the balancing act involving policies and controls amongst originators, recipients and intermediaries, fine.


But let's simply ignore efforts that are clearly intended merely to inflame.

d/

--

Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
<http://bbiw.net>

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