On Wed, 24 Apr 2002, Eric S. Johansson wrote: > At 08:51 AM 4/22/2002 -0700, Bart Schaefer wrote: > > > >The trouble is that any solution that places a burden on the sender is > >lousy social engineering. > > unfortunately, you just defined life. Everything we do that involves > learning or adapting ourselves puts a burden on the human.
So what? The point is that you have to make the benefit to the learner appear worth bearing the burden. > You've just accumulated enough scar tissue from using bad UI software so > that you cannot recognize the pain anymore. That's non sequitur. > [...] weren't these people with zero technical ability offended and > upset that you required them to use e-mail software to communicate with > you when paper and pencil was more familiar and already has a very fast > and effective delivery mechanism? No, because I *didn't* require it of them. They chose to do it themselves because they perceived a benefit to doing so. The ones who still send me paper mail get offended every time the USPS increases the postage, but the USPS has a monopoly so they grit their teeth and bear it. You have no such advantage. > As a business owner, don't you have a mailbox or a telephone so that > people you've never heard from can communicate with you? After all, why > should you expect them to do anything new when they have something that > already works. You've just made my argument for me. Yes, I do have a mailbox and phone. Email is tool for me to communicate with the people who *want* to use email in preference to other methods. I *don't* expect anyone to do anything new; in fact, I *expect* them to keep right on doing what they have been doing all along, and am pleasantly surprised when they change. (Which, incidentally, is why I don't expect this discussion to have any effect on your opinions whatsoever, no matter how well I may make my points.) Your system has to give them a *unilateral* reason to adopt it -- it has to be good for them just for them, not because it's good for everyone. > Granted, these counter-examples are probably irritating but I am trying > to show how your points are objections without foundation if you look at > the larger world. Rather, I find your refutations to be without foundation; neither of them even manages to be worth calling a counter-example. > They also show me that you haven't understood the system or I haven't > explained properly. I think you've explained properly. Perhaps I haven't. > There's nothing in the camram system to stop a legitimate e-mail user > from getting e-mail to you even without sending a coin. So what? If I can't use the absence of a coin as a point of decision, what good does the system do me? > I'm also surprised to hear you say you can't afford anything that make > it harder for people to send e-mail. With the level of false positives > one gets with any filtering system (not just pick on spamassassin), I'm > surprised you would use any form of spam protection. Actually, in the seven weeks I've been running spamassassin on a regular basis, I've had exactly two false positives, both of which were caused by the clock on the sender's PC being wildly innaccurate. I've had a few dozen false negatives, a few hundred true negatives and several thousand true positives. SA's doing it's job just fine. But I don't use SA on my business mail, only on my personal mail. I may eventually try it on the business mail, but with the threshold set a lot higher. > >Unfortunately, as a sender, I have more disincentives to deploying the > >system than incentives. > > good points. First, obviously, I believe it will reduce the amount of > spam you get which is the first why you should bother. Note that when I say "it won't reduce the amount of spam I get," what I means is that putting a coin on every message I *send* will not reduce my amount of spam. Only when a significant amount of mail I *receive* has a coin will it do me any good. I need a solution that doesn't depend on anyone but me. > The second why you should bother is that camram also provides 0 UI > opportunistic encryption for e-mail which enhances in transit privacy. That may be enough for people who understand the need, but again it's a benefit only when my correspondents also have the ability to undo the encryption. Also I'm not convinced that any such encryption would accomplish more than providing a false illusion of privacy, but then I tend to agree with those crypto-heads you've disparaged that poor security is worse than none. > >Historical precedent is that no extension to the email infrastructure can > >really succeed until it's included by the major user-agent manufacturers > >as a default part of the popular clients. End users simply won't go to > >the effort to install add-ons. > > true. End users don't go to the effort to install add-ons such as flash, > RealAudio, Acrobat, etc.. Apples and oranges. The web can allow the opportunity to install things in real time, as they're needed, and from the same source as the content they're used to view; email can't do any of that. And again there's a benefit to installing Flash -- I can see a website that I want to see. But I don't have to install the receiving end of camram to read a message from somebody using the sending end (and if I did, I'd have to know I wanted to read their mail before it would be worth doing). > >Consider the free email services (hotmail, yahoo, etc.), or even AOL's > >web-based mail interface. How many users do they have to support? How > >many non-spam messages a day do their servers generate? > > let me say it again. The coin generation happens client side. There is no "client side" in a web-based mailer, except the browser. No message asembly work happens anywhere but on the web server. It's all just an HTTP POST of the message body and some subset of the headers. > They would need to run a Java program client side to do the calculations > and pass the information back to the server. So now the free email service requires me to have a java-capable browser to use it? I suppose that's not too unreasonable, but it's annoying. Now what about, say, a Blackberry wireless email handheld? > Yes, it's work. Doing anything to defeat spam is work. Get over it. The problem is not that it's work, but that you're asking for volunteer labor. > In the meantime, small-scale users of the camram system should see a > significant drop in spam with minimal false positives. Maybe there is something you haven't explained. How does one NOT get a positive on every message that does NOT have coin? > I suggest if you want to debate this further, that we take it off list > because it is significantly of the topic for spamassassin and I feel > that I have already impose enough on the other members of the list. I'm keeping it on the list for this one more message, at least, because I think the debate is more likely to sway undecided third parties than it is to change either of our positions. _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
