Paul writes:
i want the digital equivilent of a peephole
in my front door so i can ignore the doorbell
if i don't like what i see.
One of the big problems of spam is that it takes up more than half the total
bandwidth used by e-mail. If you want a peephole, then all spam must still
be delivered, so that you can examine it and reject it. That may keep it
out of your mailbox, but the entire network is still being used to route and
deliver it, which seems wasteful.
i believe, and have always believed, that all
communications ought to be mutually consensual.
Most human communications do not involve any explicit consent. They are
initiated by one party and accepted by another. If a person refuses any
communication to which he has not consented, he spends his life alone.
plenty, no, *many* are the humans who can reach me
by digital communications for whom my consent is
seen as irrelevant (or worse.)
The same is true for your telephone, your postal mailbox, your person on the
street, radio, television, and newspapers.
my son has been receiving pornographic spam for
five years, and he just now turned twelve years old.
Another 24 months or so and you may not be the only person examining it.
did you all who contributed to the creation of
e-mail as a media believe that it should be "rated R,
no children under the age of 17 admitted without
a parent"?
Children are not interested in porn, so spamming them with it isn't nearly
as harmful as their elders would like to believe. Only adults care about
sex.
or consider the "e-mail appending" data miners,
who believe that my consent to receive a magazine
by postal mail somehow implies my consent to receive
anything else that publishing conglomerate wants
to send me by e-mail.
That seems like a rational assumption. Did you tell them otherwise?
... one is sender-paid, the other is not, and my
consent cannot be implied.
Why not?
due to accidents of fate, the CIX.NET MX RR points
at my personal server. it turns out that there are
now many millions of valid @COX.NET mailboxes,
and that through normal error rates i receive
several dozen misaddressed messages per day, usually
several of them being microsoft passport ACK's containing
enough information for me to commit identity theft if i so
desired. a lot of the mail is quite personal in
nature, too.
How do you know the e-mail is quite personal in nature, if you are just
discarding it without reading it?
is this how we thought e-mail would grow up and meet
its larger audience? not me!
It seems pretty inevitable with the increasing use of e-mail, even if it was
not a design goal.
the current system is utterly laughable and if it
were proposed apriori it would be laughed out of the room.
No, the current e-mail system works admirably well. I don't care much for
spam, but the advantages to receiving legitimate e-mail are so great that
I'm not about to sacrifice the latter to eliminate the former.
... that which was suitable for polite early adopters
in the R&E community is completely unsuiable for the full
global population ...
They why have they embraced it so willingly?
if we had end-to-end personal certificates that were
widely deployed and universally presented, it would
become reasonable to try to wire an smtp listener to
reject all but certified traffic ...
Maybe, but how would you reduce the bandwidth expended on spam, and the
processor time required to screen for it?
... but since pornospammers could and would acquire
signed certificates, we'd have to do some kind of
pgp-like kevinbacon-like "degrees of separation"
logic to find out about trust.
This is sounding more and more complicated. Why not just use the delete
key?
it turns out both of those are missing. and creating
them is a bigger problem than rewiring smtp would be.
SMTP is pretty much cast in concrete and will likely be with us for decades
to come, at the absolute minimum; so it's best to try to work within it.
as usual, i would be happiest if someone else would
take this on: i'm Busy.
No so busy that you don't have time to open spam messages and examine them
to see if they contain pornography, or personal messages to other people, or
the like.
my goal at the moment is to discover whether the ietf
possesses a "collective will" and if so, whether it is
"willing" to take on this much larger problem. so far
the answer seems to be not just "no" but "hell no!"
Probably because, in the final analysis, spam is an annoyance, but that's
about all. Like postal junk mail.