Paul writes: > i want the digital equivilent of a peephole > in my front door so i can ignore the doorbell > if i don't like what i see.
One of the big problems of spam is that it takes up more than half the total bandwidth used by e-mail. If you want a peephole, then all spam must still be delivered, so that you can examine it and reject it. That may keep it out of your mailbox, but the entire network is still being used to route and deliver it, which seems wasteful. > i believe, and have always believed, that all > communications ought to be mutually consensual. Most human communications do not involve any explicit consent. They are initiated by one party and accepted by another. If a person refuses any communication to which he has not consented, he spends his life alone. > plenty, no, *many* are the humans who can reach me > by digital communications for whom my consent is > seen as irrelevant (or worse.) The same is true for your telephone, your postal mailbox, your person on the street, radio, television, and newspapers. > my son has been receiving pornographic spam for > five years, and he just now turned twelve years old. Another 24 months or so and you may not be the only person examining it. > did you all who contributed to the creation of > e-mail as a media believe that it should be "rated R, > no children under the age of 17 admitted without > a parent"? Children are not interested in porn, so spamming them with it isn't nearly as harmful as their elders would like to believe. Only adults care about sex. > or consider the "e-mail appending" data miners, > who believe that my consent to receive a magazine > by postal mail somehow implies my consent to receive > anything else that publishing conglomerate wants > to send me by e-mail. That seems like a rational assumption. Did you tell them otherwise? > ... one is sender-paid, the other is not, and my > consent cannot be implied. Why not? > due to accidents of fate, the CIX.NET MX RR points > at my personal server. it turns out that there are > now many millions of valid @COX.NET mailboxes, > and that through normal error rates i receive > several dozen misaddressed messages per day, usually > several of them being microsoft passport ACK's containing > enough information for me to commit identity theft if i so > desired. a lot of the mail is quite personal in > nature, too. How do you know the e-mail is quite personal in nature, if you are just discarding it without reading it? > is this how we thought e-mail would grow up and meet > its larger audience? not me! It seems pretty inevitable with the increasing use of e-mail, even if it was not a design goal. > the current system is utterly laughable and if it > were proposed apriori it would be laughed out of the room. No, the current e-mail system works admirably well. I don't care much for spam, but the advantages to receiving legitimate e-mail are so great that I'm not about to sacrifice the latter to eliminate the former. > ... that which was suitable for polite early adopters > in the R&E community is completely unsuiable for the full > global population ... They why have they embraced it so willingly? > if we had end-to-end personal certificates that were > widely deployed and universally presented, it would > become reasonable to try to wire an smtp listener to > reject all but certified traffic ... Maybe, but how would you reduce the bandwidth expended on spam, and the processor time required to screen for it? > ... but since pornospammers could and would acquire > signed certificates, we'd have to do some kind of > pgp-like kevinbacon-like "degrees of separation" > logic to find out about trust. This is sounding more and more complicated. Why not just use the delete key? > it turns out both of those are missing. and creating > them is a bigger problem than rewiring smtp would be. SMTP is pretty much cast in concrete and will likely be with us for decades to come, at the absolute minimum; so it's best to try to work within it. > as usual, i would be happiest if someone else would > take this on: i'm Busy. No so busy that you don't have time to open spam messages and examine them to see if they contain pornography, or personal messages to other people, or the like. > my goal at the moment is to discover whether the ietf > possesses a "collective will" and if so, whether it is > "willing" to take on this much larger problem. so far > the answer seems to be not just "no" but "hell no!" Probably because, in the final analysis, spam is an annoyance, but that's about all. Like postal junk mail.
