On Feb 1, 2004, at 12:48 PM, John W. Noerenberg II wrote:
Well, now you've gone and made the tacit assumption explicit,
Iljitsch. Should it be possible for a sender using a romanized script
to address a message destined for a receiver using an oriental script
(to pick one specific situation)?
Given that it's a common occurrence today, it needs to exist. Think of
all of the asian-native speakers that are subscribed to various
english-language mailing lists for various open source projects based
in north america or europe.
Many people are bilingual, especially outside of the U.S. And many of
us communicate globally already, by finding a common tongue (english or
whatever), which may or may not be 'native' for either of us, or for
our operating systems.
And then there are programs that generate e-mail. How many languages
does Mailman support in translations? What's its 'native' language,
anyway?
robots programmed to abuse the mail system. I now have decent
anti-spam software, but the trouble is that I still have to go through
all rejected messages to see whether there are any false positives.
not so silly question: the modern postal system dates back to Benjamin
Franklin, and paper-based mail dates back to the creation of paper (and
before that, there was probably clay-based cuneiform mail, but the
messenger rates higher) -- and have you ever made the mistake of
throwing away a bill, or opening up an ad thinking it was something
else?
false positives and false negatives. And that system's had hundreds to
thousands of years to be perfected. So -- let's start by realizing that
100% perfection only exists in theory.
Receivers should be able to distinguish messages specifically
addressed to them from those that are not.
Not quite right. Try this:
Receiving systems should be given the information needed to decide
whether to accept the message, and recipient users should be given the
information needed to decide whether to open/read the message in a way
that's trustable and reliable.
"Specifically addressed to them" isn't really the answer. "Whether they
want it" is. The former excludes stuff like multi-cast messaging, for
instance or, if you want to be pedantic (I don't) mailing list
messages, since those are addressed to a mail list they happen to be a
member of. The latter is what you're really looking for: "someone
offered me this message. do I accept it?"
Addressing is just one one aspect of acceptance. after all, the reason
all that spam ends up in your mailbox is because it *is* addressed to
you -- it's the sender information that's forged that's the problem.