On Sun, 07 Sep 2003 12:56:04 +0800
Shelby Moore <coolpage(_at_)earthlink(_dot_)net> wrote:
What you are saying IMO, is that you can't force bulk emailers or spammers
to use opt-in.
Let's be even clearer. What's being claimed is that you can't force bulk
emailers to send their email via "pull" technology (whether this means
providing their own POP servers, IMAP servers, NNTP servers, web servers,
whatever) while everyone else can still use "push". And the question isn't
really whether bulk mail can be statistically distinguished from non-bulk
mail (since that's really just a matter of whether you can get people to
adopt a definition of "bulk" in terms of externally visible traffic
properties) - the question is whether you can enforce that rule.
IMHO - most recipients don't want to get their mail that way (and many of
the deployed user agents don't support it), most senders don't want the
increased burden of providing POP/IMAP/NNTP/web servers and the necessary
customer support, and there are enough ISPs that derive significant revenue
from selling bandwidth to spammers that it would be extremely difficult to get
them all to enforce this. In short: nobody has sufficient incentive to adopt
this.
Of course there's nothing wrong with defining another way to distribute bulk
mail that people can use if they wish. If it works well, some people will
use it. The stretch is to insist that everybody do it this way.