on 5/27/2003 12:28 PM Zefram wrote:
Whether the receiving-end filtering approach is viable in the long
term is debateable. When 99.9% of email is spam, the filtering world
will look very different. Perhaps at that point it'll be infeasible to
continue allowing unsolicited email at all.
Some of us are already at that point and are wanting to have the debate
right now.
Every system can be fooled (corrollary: every fool has a system). This
includes pre-emptive measures like laws, pre-transfer black/whitelists,
and post-transfer filtering techniques. What laws provide over the other
mechanisms is a discouragement hammer. The other mechanisms are purely
defensive, and as I said earlier, only have value if you redefine some
measure of defeat as victory.
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/