On Sun, 16 Feb 2003 02:06:46 -0800 Bob Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Look at TMDA. http://tmda.net/ Yeah, that's about the same idea. Has anyone tried this? I would be interested to know how this works in practice. > Does that answer some of your objections? Does it sound like a > reasonable system yet? It sounds possible, but when I imagine this in real life I see a lot of possible problems. The first thing I imagine is that the next Outlook worm that hits the streets will cause said program to send a lot of postmarked mail to certain places for major profit to the writer and major losses to a lot of people. Maybe even send it around all over the place! That would certainly be a worthy Culture Jam... One solution could be to use a partiular MUA for this service, but that raises even more issues that I'm sure I don't have to detail here. I'm sure I could come up with more, but I haven't had my coffee yet. If we have some kind of authentication that we trust our money with, why isn't that authentication good enough to use without bringing money into it? This gives me another idea... What if all email you sent had to contain your digital signature. Without one, the MTA rejects the mail. All spam that made it to your box would contain a digital signature meaning that you know exactly who sent it (This is assuming, of course, that there was a reliable signing authority and good/quick procedures in place for providing new signed keys to people. Once you had one, it is yours for life or whatever). How much spam would stop if it couldn't be anonymous?? I don't know, I'm asking what other people think. I think if everyone knew who was sending them advertizements, the backlash on these people or businesses would be enough to make spam much less attractive. I would like to say that I think every idea presented here so far, including mine, have major problems that are possibly worse than spam. In the case of my original argument for rejecting known sources in order to convince them to stop or whatever, I don't think participation would be high enough to even begin to make that work. The current usage of huristics and so forth is imperfect as well, but it seems to be a compromise that many people can live with (and it's voluntary!). I imagine it will be around for a while, leaving more serious action to individuals (such as the tmda thing). I would be so upset over for-pay email and/or laws governing email that I would probably find myself another line of work out of pure grief. I realize this is melodromatic, but these things share my nightmares with oxogen rationing and laughter taxing... ...now for that coffee... --TimH _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
