on 5/30/2003 11:45 AM 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/business/yourmoney/25SPAM.html?pagewanted=3
leads with the question "Microsoft has spent more than a half-billion
dollars trying to build software to filter out spam. Why isn't that good
enough?" Note that the responder doesn't challenge the amount.
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.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/05/30/HNmsspam_1.html demonstrates
that at least some of the large mailers still beleive there is a problem
worth addressing, and that they are continuing to spend towards solving
the problem.
There's no need to hypothesize about much of this. There is a problem,
obviously. Some of the specific approaches have proven to be untenable
(many of the approaches which were discussed here have been tried and
apparently rejected as part of the Black Penny Project for example). I
think it's equally obvious that companies are spending massive amounts of
money to try and solve this problem (assuming we agree that $500 million
from one company qualifies as "massive"), and that they are continuing to
pursue those solutions which are probably the most viable for their
peculiar situations.
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/