On 09/26/03 at 16:15 -0500, Joe Sporleder opined:
> And even with the stretch of the imagination it is made a "free speech"
> issue, doesn't my right to choose not to listen apply here too?
Sing it with me, Brother! ;-)
> So, which does folks consider worse, email spam, telemarketing or junk
> snail mail?
I'd probably have to say junk snail mail. It wastes a lot more physical
resources (trees, energy, etc.) and causes real pollution. On the other
hand, I spend a lot more of my own time dealing with spam, but that's
because, for the most part, other people deal with snail mail for me and
also because stemming the tide of spam is part of my job...
> As far as the fight against spam, will SIMS and similar programs be
> adequate for the foreseeable future, or will the email paradigm need to
> have major changes?
The one thing SIMS can't do is content filtering. It's restricted to
rejecting mail based on envelope information. When I first started using
SIMS all these many years ago, that was considered by many people on this
list to be a good thing. There are/were liability issues involved when you
start filtering based on content, but those concerns have apparently become
less important than keeping spam out of our networks. At any rate, I've
lately been weighing the possibility of replacing my SIMS installation with
something like postfix or exim on an OS X box so that I can use something
like SpamAssassin on incoming mail and also possibly a virus scanner
(although only a handful of my users are foolish enough to use Windoze).
> I have heard some saying that all email should become secured, with
> the likes of PGP and other certification processes, to check the
> validity of a particular email. The plus I see is that it could
> potentially make it more difficult to send "fake" email credentials,
> but a major downside would be that email would lose its simplicity
> that has made it so universally accessible, even for the average
> person, so I would hate to see email become too complicated and lose
> its appeal as a easy, user friendly communication medium.
The accessibility thing is probably a big issue with this. I think that
content filtering, both rules-based and statistical approaches like
Bayesian filters, has a lot to offer before we force everyone to do
anything like PGP signing every message they send.
--
Christopher Bort | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Webmaster, Global Homes | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<http://www.globalhomes.com/>
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