In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Bernie Cosell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On 18 Nov 99, at 12:13, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>> Let's say that I am an ISP (perhaps even AOL), and that you are a mailing
>> list owner/administrator. Now let's say that I send you a short questionare
>,
>> and ask you to fill it out and send it back to me if you want to be able
>> to send mail to my users. What will be your reaction? What will be the
>> reaction fo the typical mailing list administrator?
>
>AND... what will be your reaction when this is the 2,587th request, as
>yet *another* ISP checks in.
Yes. There's a problem there too.
>> .. I'm sure that some percentage of list admins would be
>> understanding, and that they would just comply (as long as the request
>> seemed polite and inoffensive enough), but I suspect that there are many
>> more who would take offense, and who would never comply, no matter how
>> trivial or easy complying might be, and that there would be an even larger
>> number who wouldn't take offense, but would just ignore the request because
>> they feel that they are too busy to be answering silly questions from ISP.
>
>And, as I say, even if you're gracious about the first ISP or the tenth,
>I doubt you'll _still_ be a cooperative camper with the hundredth or
>thousandth...
Agreed.
>The only possible hope for something like this is some sort of trusted
>global registry: if enough ISPs banded together coercively, they might be
>able to convince list admins to fill in some standard form *once*, and
>then any ISP that cares would be able to consult the DB and not bother
>the list-admin.
Yep. That was my point. In theory, yes, this would be nice. Could it
be made to work in practice? That looks very iffy.
>It is always exciting trying to create order out of anarchy...
Exciting yes, but if I have understood it right, I believe that the
third (or was it the second) law of thermodynamics insures that in
the Long Run, anarchy always wins. :-(
>... but if it
>could be done, it could might even be feasible: the next version of
>majordomo, say, could include as a feature auto-registering any new
>mailing list on behalf of the list owner, or something like that ... And
>so all you need is almost every MLM, almost every list admin and almost
>every ISP to agree... piece of cake... :o)
Right! Piece of cake!
<<insert appropriate references to the notion of hearding cats>>
>Of course, you'd also have
>to find a way to prevent a spammer from 'registering' [amidst the at-
>least hundreds-of-thousands of lists in the master registry]
Yea. There's that little problem too.
(AOL's solution, imperfect as it is, is looking better and better all
the time. :-)
>So, on top of everything else, don't you still have the problem that
>email is largely unauthenticated? Or is that a
>separate/simpler/different problem?
Same problem, different context.
Neither I nor anybody else seem to care very much if you send _one_
unauthenticated message to my server.
If you are trying to send 50,000 message to my server however, I might
kinda like to know (a) that you are who you say you are and that (b)
you are not a spammer. Part (a) is easily possible to acheve with
modern public key cryptography, at least if one assumes the cooperation
of all of the relevant parties. Part (b) however may be insoluable,
unless of course all mailing lists admins worldwide are henceforth
required to put up non-trivial monetary bonds (which would be non-
refundable if they were caught spamming).
And on that note, I will ask to be excused now. I have to go feed my
flock of flying pigs.
:-)
