Schemes that attempt to assess the desirability of the email
to the recipient have been tried - personal whitelists,
personal Bayesian filters, etc. etc. In practice they haven't
worked all that well, perhaps due to the average user's
inability to capably and consistently perform such assessments.
You are talking about the operational imperative. In ops
you have to work with what you have and make the best of
things.
Well, sure. When you have a million users it's not only
difficult to focus on an individual user's needs, it's also
totally inappropriate.
In ops, yes. But in design its the other way around. The needs
of a single user form a use-case which guides the designers.
In this forum there are some who believe that the Internet
email architecture can be reformed so that it does not have
the same weakenesses which allow the flood of spam to produce
a positive statistical result for the spammers.
DNSBLs may be needed today in email operations, but if the
IETF steps up and does the work to fix the root of the
problem, perhaps they won't be needed at all in the
future.
And from what I've seen most of the ones I deal with - these
folks are our main customers - take those responsibilities
extremely seriously, if for no other reason than large
numbers of complaints are very costly to deal with and will
end up getting them fired.
Again you are talking about email operations which is
dealt with very well by MAAWG.
It provoked a strong reaction from me because it both
reminded me of the appallingly low quality of the previous
discourse and seemed like an indication of the resumption of
same. And I simply couldn't take another round of it.
So how do you and Ted reach consensus? What is it that
you and he have failed to understand which causes you
to have such emotionally opposite reactions? I suspect
that you are thinking like an email operator who has the
position that you can't change what is being thrown at
you so you just have to deal with it and live with the
damage. And Ted is thinking like a user who wishes that
Internet email would just work, like his TV and his web
browser. Neither of you are wrong.
--Michael Dillon
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