Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
...
So far on this thread, we have heard from none of the "large-scale
mail carriers", although we have heard that the spam problem is
costing them millions of dollars a year. That should be a clue to the
IETF list. If there is a problem that is affecting a company to the
tune of millions of dollars a year, and that company thinks that the
problem could be solved, they would spend that much money to solve
it. Please note that they aren't.
Well, perhaps it's more accurate to say "if they thought it could be
solved by working with all those nice and entusiastic folks on the IETF
general discussion list"... ;-)
I have spoken to some of these heavily-affected companies (instead of
just hypothesizing about them). Their answers were all the same: they
don't believe the problem is solvable for the amount of money that
they are losing. They would love to solve the spam problem: not only
would doing so save them money, it would get them new income. Some
estimate this potential income to be hundreds of millions of dollars
a year, much more than they are losing on spam. But they believe that
the overhead of the needed trust system, and the cost of losing mail
that didn't go through the trust system, is simply too high.
You might disagree with them, and based on that disagreement you
might write a protocol. But don't do so saying "the big carriers will
want this" without much more concrete evidence as to their desires.
Paul, are you aware of any concrete numbers here? I've looked through
the IMC site, but the only references to cost seem to be in a report
from the late 90's, with no hard data. If not, this might be something
the IMC could consider pulling together? I'd agree that there's way too
much hand-waving going on here on this point...
- peterd
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Peter Deutsch pdeutsch(_at_)gydig(_dot_)com
Gydig Software
"Angels fly because they take themselves so lightly"
- G.K. Chesterton
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