The [EMAIL PROTECTED] identifiers Jabber uses, look pretty much like email addresses. But how many people / web users are really confused by this syntax similarity? Has anybody ever tried to produce some statistic, how many people in fact ever errornously treated JIDs as email addresses and therefore had a bad experience with their email apps?
A lot of assumptions surround this topic. One of that being that many users (AOL) were dumber than email harvesters, and a majority would never grok the difference between [EMAIL PROTECTED] and real email addresses (even if for example labeled that way on your typical web site). This may or may not be proved by analyzing what rebounds on port 25 on typical Jabber servers (if it wasn't that this is 99.99% spam). Has anybody here ever attempted to spot out how much of the SMTP posts to [EMAIL PROTECTED] addresses have been real emails sent by novice users? Or exist any other estimations or surveys which back the dumb-as-bread- users assumption, or the opposite? Of course, it's too late to change it anyhow - but theoretical: If [EMAIL PROTECTED] JIDs were really more trouble for users (because of poor experiences with email clients) than its semantics are worth, would anybody here want -from todays point of view- to drop it in favour of DNS-only names or lengthy URIs? How stout is the "@" still bound to SMTP since the rise of Jabber/XMPP as 'official' Internet protocol? Why I'm asking: I recently tried to advocate a similar [EMAIL PROTECTED] syntax as shortcut for Web URLs (as replacement for less user-friendly OpenID homepage addresses). But because of the fear for AOL users, this was quickly dismissed there with "Jabber also got this wrong". _______________________________________________ jdev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/jdev
