On Sun, 07 Sep 2003 09:58:47 +0800, Shelby Moore said: > If it became an RFC or internet standard, and it became widely adopted, then >it is reasonable to assume that email clients would add features to handle this > . It is quite a low bandwidth operation (probably less than 1K bytes) to poll > a POP server for email
It's not the bandwidth - it's the fact that there are these annoying things called "timeouts". For *each* server that isn't reachable, you get to wait a minute or so - suddenly those 150 checks are taking quite some time. And the queuing theory of 150 sites with intermittent connectivity doing a push to your POP server is different than what you see when you try to do 150 pulls.... But of course, if you actually *tried* this, you'd understand it... > However, there is one key technological hurdle I did miss in my haste, there > would need to be some mechanism so that the same user doesn't keep downloading > the same messages over and over again. This would either require a special > modification > to the POP server and require each user to login with a unique user name. Hey.. what did I tell you? Everybody needs a login of their own... > And as a side benefit, there would be no way for someone to subscribe me to a > list without my permission, as can be done by sniffing an authentication email > for Majordomo. If your confirmation mail is being sniffed, you have *BIGGER* issues. And if you have bigger issues, I suggest using the *proper* tools for the job. See RFCs 2362-2364 and 3156. If your issues are bigger than that, e-mail subscriptions are the least of your problems. > False. You are correct that I missed this issue in my initial post. > However, it need be only one POP account (one storage of emails) with flags for > each user. In other words, the storage requirement need no increase > drastically with number of subscribed users. Hmm... store each mail as an object with links for each recipient. A truly novel idea, our homegrown mail system implemented it back in 1992. > The flags can either be stored at the > POP server > and then give each user a unique login id, Hey.. there's that unique login again. > No only 6000 POP accounts. See above how email clients can handle the > detection of new messages using UIDL. And you only need one anonymous login > and no password (just configure the POP server to accept any login and > password). And I tell *MY* UIDL from Keith Moore's UIDL from Vernon Schreyer's UIDL how? > >Have you actually *TRIED* to use more than 100 POP accounts under any current > >mail software? > I will respond with similarly rhetorical question. Did you try to use > Netscape 2 on most current web pages? Why make any application RFC if there > can be no progress in applications? There's a difference - I'm not proposing a new scheme of doing things that involves a change to 500 million users. So I submit to you that if this idea is too hard to use with the current version of Outlook, it is a *non starter* as a practical matter. > 50, even 5000, is not statistically bulk on internet scale. Is it not > possible (or likely) to write laws without exclusions? Do you think Hosts, > ISPs, and anti-spam software would not account for this statistical phenomenon? Only problem is that many spammers are *already* only dropping 40-50 copies of a note at a site at a time, specifically to work around that - then the rest of the spamming recipients at your site get a different version with a different From: line and a different source IP address. I submit to you that if you didn't realize this was happening, you may not be qualified to be suggesting proposals to counter it.... (Hint - if spammers weren't doing this, it would be trivial to block them, and we'd not be HAVING this discussion, right? ;) > >It's ironic that you're proposing this on a push-based mailing list provided by > >an organization that is probably not in a position to provide POP accounts for > >the 30,000 or so recipients of the the list. > No. As I said above, they would only need to provide one POP account for this > mailing list. And as I pointed out, you'll need to create 30,000, because one account doesn't allow you to keep track of who has already seen what messages. And no, you're *NOT* allowed to just say "everybody can fetch all the UIDLs and we'll just tag them with the subscriber ID" - go read and *UNDERSTAND* section 6.2 of RFC2298 in order to understand why. You might also want to go re-read the ASRG mailing list archives, your proposal (and variants thereof) has been kicked down the beach like a dead whale multiple times already.
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