At 2003-12-30 16:24, Roger Morella wrote: >Bob has missed the point that my idea was a VOLUNTARY ALTERNATIVE. I am >completely serious, as this has become a serious issue. This has long >passed the point of "hitting the delete key a few times". And the cat >and mouse filter game will NEVER provide an adequate solution. As a >matter of fact, filters just make matters worse. The better the filters >get, the more spam a spammer has to send out in order to get the same >number of "hits". Ironically, better filters gaurentee a proportionately >higher number of spam. This is not a problem if you happen to be someone >who is good at tuning spam filters, and has the time to deal with them. >But for the 99.99% of us who have neithor the time, technical abilities >or patience, we can no longer trust the system as it stands, thereby >limiting it to a necessary evil to be used only with a redundant backup >at hand. > >The only solution that will work is to provide an alternative service >that is not subject to the abuse that our current unregulated email >services allow. You do that by providing a service that restricts use >to only those who are willing to pay for it. The US Postal Service has >been providing a valuable service at a reasonable cost since it's >inception. It seems completely logical to me that they would be in a >position to do the same thing with email. It's a fairly simple and >obvious solution, as far as I'm concerned. And, Bob, don't worry... the >government will never take away your right to waste your time and >resources as you see fit. After-all, email as it currently exists will >always be an option. > >Now. If someone has a reason, other than paranoia, that this approach >won't work, I'd really like to hear it.
Your 'solution' is just another new highly regulated system next to the existing (problematical) system. How will it ever replace the old system? Will you yourself no longer accept regular emails? I can't afford to, because I have way too many contacts and people contacting me via regular email. What you're suggesting is something like that we all throw away our VHS-recorders today and all buy Betamax's again tomorrow. But that is not how the world and the internet work. You can't expect the whole world to write-off all of it's old investments overnight. And as Declan pointed out, the USA is not the world and it's a very global problem. The Dutch postal service is very reliable but in the USA, Federal Express, UPS etc. surfaced, I assume because the US Postal Service wasn't reliable or quick enough (?). I agree that a small payment ($0.01 or so) per email would work wonders if it were enforcable, but it isn't because it's not present in the current protocols and servers and it's very expensive to implement. Please consider that in telephony traditionally about half of the hardware cost was spend on keeping track of the costs per call and per time unit etc. (Which was also the reason why local calls used to be for free or did cost only one tick in large parts of the world). I think that version 6 of the IP protocol can keep track of costs, but it's still in the middle of being introduced in the major systems. A philosophy of some friends and me is that only new consumer technology that is about 10 times as good can replace older technology in a non-compatible way. Technology changes that succeeded: - LP to CD - Videotape to DVD (still busy) - the addition of teletext in Europe Technology changes that didn't succeed: - Analogue telephony to ISDN - Video tape to optical movie disk (Of course IPV6 will be slowly introduced because it's compatible.) Greetings, Jaap -- Author: Jaap van Ganswijk INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB CHIPDIR-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
