On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 09:54:32AM -0700, Mark C. Ballew wrote: > Commercial bulk email will eventually cause our the current version of > electronic mail to buckle. I see nothing wrong with sending 15,000
Well, I agree with you that SMTP will eventually get replaced. I really liked DJB's IM2000 proposal (http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html), although it's unlikely to get anywhere anytime soon. The main problem with email, per se, is that it places a burden on the recipient to store/process/forward/etc. At some point, when people get fed up with having to dork with spam filters, we'll adopt something along the lines of a store-and-notify protocol (instead of store-and-forward) so that people sending out bulk emails will have to store them locally and accept the volume of incoming traffic to read the messages. I don't like the idiotic proposals that commercial companies keep floating for making email cost money (e.g. charging micropayments for each email). I just think that the cost structure should essentially be shifted from the recipient to the sender by the nature of the underlying protocol. The real problem with spam is that it's profitable, and that the commercial interests behind it ensure that the politicians are kept fat and happy with PAC money so that nothing will be done about it. That's the real crime here. I don't mind opt-in bulk mail, but I maintain a blacklist of "legitimate" opt-out businesses (e.g. real businesses that lost their legitimacy in my eyes when they decided to go with opt-out instead of opt-in), filter most of my mailboxes with TMDA, and filter the rest with bogofilter. I still get a few spams a week in the non-TMDA folders, but it's livable. As for bulk-mailing companies, if they don't forge their emails, I don't care, since I can blacklist them, filter them, refuse their SMTP transactions, and a host of other things to avoid paying for their spam with my time or bandwidth. It's still socially unacceptable, IMHO, but definitely easier to deal with. -- Find my Techno-Geek Journal at http://www.codegnome.org/geeklog/ _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
