ietf-smtp
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Re: Has the IETF dropped the ball?

2005-03-10 10:33:09

On Wed March 9 2005 22:03, Keith Moore wrote:

The key problems are social, not technical.

while I don't disagree, that's not a helpful statement.  spam is a 
social problem because it involves a conflict between the desire of the 
sender and the desire of the recipient.  but because the two are at a 
distance, you can't solve the problem by purely social means.  nor can 
you solve the problem by purely technical means, or purely legal means. 

A two-stage transfer whereby the message stays on the sender's host
until retrieved by the recipient (who is sent some sort of
notification that a message is pending) [such as one of Bernstein's
schemes] might balance the desires of sender and recipient.
However, that would be an entirely new architecture, has some
serious drawbacks for mobile users and other users w/o full-time
connectivity, and has not (to my knowledge) been written up even
in draft form.