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Re: on UCE: Possible Interest (fwd)

2002-08-19 17:53:26
If spam really isn't a problem, then the efforts involved in ultimately
engineering a real solution, which in my opinion has to use economic
forces, and the efforts involved in engineering easy user interfaces,
will not be worth it.

If spam really is a problem and is exponentially leading to email
becoming unusable in most cases, then these engineering efforts are
worth it and if the protocol aspects are not done in a standard manner,
they will be done in proprietary ways.

Some systems that would like to be closed would probably be delighted to
provide a control whereby their users can very simply and very easily
decided binarily whether they are connected to outside Internet mail or
not, hoping that any foolish enough to choose to be connected will find
their mailbox overflowing with so much spam so quickly that they will be
driven back to only allowing communication with others in the closed
system.

Alternatively, if a user can't or won't configure any whitelist and
their system just defaults to charging, say, 5 cents for each incoming
email, and this behaviour were common, what would the effect be? If most
spam went away, their cost for sending mail would be approximately
cancelled by their income from receiving mail. Even if they never
receive mail and send 5 messages a day, you are only talking about less
than $8 a month. Whatever residual spam there was would respresent an
income stream for them or their ISP. They wouldn't be able to subscribe
to mailing lists (unless the mailing list operator went to a bunch of
work and allowed people to pay for subscription to cover the delivery
costs) but how bad is that? Better than email becoming worthless, I'd
say. And how hard would it really be to have a good user interface for
just whitelisting mailing lists?

This is a complex space. I've always said it would be enormously
difficult to deploy such a system. But I'm also not impressed by glib
responses claiming its completely impossible because of user interface
problems.  Even if that were true for 95% of users, which I don't
accept, it seems to me it would be better to have email be useful for 5%
of users than for 0%.

Donald
======================================================================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd                       
dee3(_at_)torque(_dot_)pothole(_dot_)com
 155 Beaver Street              +1-508-634-2066(h) +1-508-851-8280(w)
 Milford, MA 01757 USA                   
Donald(_dot_)Eastlake(_at_)motorola(_dot_)com

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:

Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 13:35:45 -0400
From: Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu
To: Donald Eastlake 3rd <dee3(_at_)TORQUE(_dot_)POTHOLE(_dot_)COM>
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: on UCE: Possible Interest (fwd)

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 09:22:59 EDT, Donald Eastlake 3rd 
<dee3(_at_)torque(_dot_)pothole(_dot_)com>  said:

The cost is be set by the recipient. They maintain a white list of
people / mailing lists that can send them mail without charge. They get
to choose whether to trust the From address or require mail to be
digitally signed to qualify for white list treatment or allow free mail
if a special password header is present or whatever. Almost all mailing

Been a while since you worked a help desk, huh? :)

An amazingly large percentage of users have trouble understanding the
"please reply to this message to confirm your subscription" mail that is
sent by most popular mailing list management software.

For that matter, an even more amazing number of these "please reply" messages
bounce because the user didn't configure their OWN e-mail address correctly
(today's favorite - 
John(_dot_)(_dot_)(_dot_)Smith(_at_)mail(_dot_)(_dot_)domain(_dot_)(_dot_)(_dot_)com
 who obviously needs to
debounce that '.' key ;)

And you want them to cut-and-paste the list address into a form AND get
all the right options set too?  I think you're giving the users too much
credit for possessing operational neurons....
--
                              Valdis Kletnieks
                              Computer Systems Senior Engineer
                              Virginia Tech



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