On Sep 1, 2010, at 3:26 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:
On 09/01/2010 02:49 PM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
If your goal is to have MLM developers rewrite their perfectly working
code to work around the fundamental flaws in ADSP - a protocol nobody
other than bulk mailers is interested in, and which in any even
marginally sane deployment would never interact with mailing lists at
all - I think you're going to be disappointed.
"No Mr. Bond, I want you to die".
Setting aside ADSP for a second, I think there are still some people that
would like to see MLMs preserve author signatures for the purposes of
reputation evaluation.
The implicit argument being made amongst the more vocal set here is that
since mailing lists coexisted with cavemen and dinosaurs, that their very
antiquity puts them beyond the scope of evolution. That if it wasn't
intelligently designed in o those 5000 years ago, that they have no
responsibility for the current internet's trials and tribulations.
The fact of the matter is that mailing lists survival or extinction
is utterly irrelevant to the internet at large; if we did harm to them,
nobody using the internet at large would care. Hence all of this hand
wringing about whether mailing list developers or operators will
petulantly stamp their feet and take their marbles home presumes they
have power they do not actually hold.
This draft shouldn't be starting from the perspective of what reactionary
old fogies will or won't do. It should be starting from the perspective
of what's right for email as it's actually used today. If what's right
is that unsigned mail should become a pariah -- which I suspect is the
right thing -- then all of the howls of indignation should just be ignored.
And as is always the case, the whiners will figure something out if the,
uh, laser is positioned correctly.
You want to optimize email for sending bulk mail. That's one of the main things
DKIM is good for, and it's pretty much the sole domain of ADSP.
You're not the only one who wants to do that, not by a long way. And the vast
majority of email, by messages sent, is bulk email so doing some work to make
that work better (such as DKIM, say) isn't a bad idea.
But when you go on to try and optimize the email system for junk B2C email at
the expense of communication between individuals and groups then I think that's
harmful to the ecosystem.
The 95% of emails that are B2C bulk mail are not more important than the 5%
that are communication between individuals.
Cheers,
Steve
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