Re: [Asrg] attention bonds, was Email Postage


On Nov 25, 2008, at 8:21 AM, Al Iverson wrote:

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 9:17 AM, mathew <meta(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> wrote:

...and so on. Offering nothing positive, these naysayers shoot downeveryproposal with the same tired objections that have been addressedover and
over and over as unreasonable or out of touch with reality.


As one of the naysayers, please allow me to encourage everybody who
thinks they can build such a thing to go do it. I think it's possible.
It just takes many millions of dollars, and it won't cover all email,
leaving some pretty big gaps.

Look at Goodmail....Daniel did it, is doing it. He didn't spend a
month of Sundays debating it with geeks on a list. Notice a difference
in approach there? Look REALLY closely. (DID IT, vs CRYING ABOUT HOW
PEOPLE ARE SO MEAN ABOUT IT NOT BEING A GREAT IDEA.)

Look at DNSBLs -- an example of a spam filtering mechanism that is
commonly accepted as best practice, even though it is heavily debated
by geeks and non-geeks. SORBS, Spamhaus, etc., they just went ahead
and did it. They decided the rules and decided to sell themselves, see
if they can drive recipient sites to agree and use their filters. To
varying degrees, of course, and some DNSBLs are run by morons. But
again, what's the difference there? Less debating, more doing.

Lessons to learn: There is no need to announce an e-Postage system on
this, or any other, geek-laden discussion list. If you do, you will be
pelted with eggs. If you want to make something happen, go make
something happen. Build it, then try to get people to come.


Conversely, if you try and build it and fall into exactly the
problems that either you didn't find out about because you didn't
ask people who know what they're talking about, or because
you did ask them but didn't want to believe or dig into the details
of the replies, you'll end up having wasted an awful lot of time
and effort that could have been avoided, and likely have people
pointing and laughing.

But when you get to the point of insulting people about how
they're wrong and you're right, you've probably extracted all
the wisdom you're going to get from that group of people, and
it's probably time to go and implement something.

In protocol development circles there's nothing much more
compelling than successfully interoperating implementations.

Cheers,
  Steve

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