there's more than one kind of effectiveness. effectiveness at getting
a technology deployed is quite different from effectiveness of that
technology (once deployed) at supporting reliable operation for a
variety of applications.
keith - may i refer you to don eastlake's earlier reply? viz., the existing
system is quite effective because products that don't play by the concensus
rules have a much harder time thriving or even surviving.
sometimes this works. as a generalization, it doesn't hold up.
Just to pick a small example: MIME has been out for nearly 10 years and
I'm still receiving, on a daily basis, MIME attachments that are
unreadable because they lack proper content-type labelling.
That's not what I would call "effective".
then ignore it or fix it. obviously, the pain isn't at the point where it
bothers you... for myself, the program that handles my incoming mail dumps
MIME-bad stuff into an audit file and then ignores it. if it was
"important", then whoever sent it can get on the phone... in doing this for
the last 10 years, i've yet to suffer a mishap because of this...
that kind of solution is easy for you or me. unfortunately, it doesn't
scale to a user base of 100s of millions of people that's trying to use
email to ship around attachments and wondering why they don't work.
the reason I don't filter such stuff is because I want to understand the
kinds of problems other folks are having.
Keith