You seem to be missing the issue of Shannon's theorem. The IETF is about
protocols, not about collecting and sharing statistics for bayesian
filters.
It is not the case that nothing can be done about spam. However, it is the
case that _protocols_ can do nothing about spam. So, there is nothing for
the IETF to do, any more than the IETF can do anything to catch terrorists
such as Al Quaeda, who also abuse the communications infrastructure.
Try to recast all of your arguments to stop terrorists instead of
spammers, and you will see just how foolish they are.
"Osama bin Laden halted from communicating with Al Quaeda cells by closing
open relays". Obviously not. So why would you think open relays have
anything whatsoever to do with spam? (because radical anti-spammers think
they must, and they conduct abuse of them, perhaps.) Once you do that,
you will see what crusades are foolish.
--Dean
On 27 May 2003, Paul Vixie wrote:
michel(_at_)arneill-py(_dot_)sacramento(_dot_)ca(_dot_)us ("Michel Py")
writes:
Paul, I'm curious: why are you wasting your time with this? Any
withdrawals from not fighting it on a daily basis?
because several years ago when iesg commissioned a wg to study the spam
issue and decide whether ietf had a role, the carefully worded answer was
"no". i thought this answer was short-sighted or wrong-headed or both.
c'mon guys & dolls, smtp and the model behind/beneath it are failing to
address the need for universal batch communication. we fixed the encoding
problems (trying to fit things into a 990-by-7 box was hard without mime)
and it only took four and a half years of bitchfesting and the results have
been nothing less than spectacular (in that i don't get uuencoded tarballs
from nextstep users any more.)
on april 28 of this year, aol/microsoft/yahoo publically teamed up to fight
spam (since statistically speaking, it is universally launched by their
collective customers and aimed at their collective customers.) see
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0428aolmsya.html for the announcement.
does anyone here think this will solve the problem for anybody, even the
customers of those three customers?
i'm wasting my time because i want this problem looked at more broadly.
--
Paul Vixie