Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 15:00:28 -0800 From: Brad Templeton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [IP] more on Why Technologists Should Stay Involved with SPAM Legislation To: Dave Farber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> seeing them as either/or propositions, as in "my spam solution is better > than yours" and start trying to implement as many of them as possible, as > cooperatively as possible. This applies not only to competing antispam
How could one argue with this seemingly obvious sentiment?
Alas, one can. Battles among anti-spam options are not simply over their efficacy. The real question is what level of collateral damage they cause, in particular in terms of blocked legitimate mail (if they are filters) chilled speech and bad precedent (if they are laws,) blocking of anonymous speech (if they are authentication schemes) as well as breaking of valued principles (mistaking a feature of our efficient, open email system as a bug.)
So we can't just "implement as many of them as possible" any more than we would want to implement as many of the anti-crime or anti-terror proposals (ubiquitous surveillance cameras, elmination of rules of justice and civil rights) as we can.
However, I do agree with the main sentiment that there will not be
just one system that solves all problems. I think the first goal is
to get people to loosen their definition of the problem. Too many
consider the problem to be annoying mail, or annoying advertising,
but it's a crazy goal to get rid of all annoying mail or all advertising.
What we want is to get rid of the flood, the overloaded mailboxes and
servers. Once you accept that more modest goal (which still solves 99%
of the problem as far as anybody can see) many more solutions present
themsevles without the collateral damage, and we can follow Nat's course.
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