On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, jdow wrote:
If this is real and not make believe for a class somewhere in school then Marc is a VERY dangerous person with an agenda.
I don't agree about the agenda, but I do agree about the danger. If it is the case, it's simply depressing that the UN would take input about fighting the spam problem from someone who seems to lack a basic understanding of some of the important details of how e-mail works, namely that writing down on a piece of paper (even if it's signed by Kofi Annan and all the leaders of every country in the world) that "henceforth, all SMTP connections will only come from legit servers" has no effect on what actually happens.
The answer is easy, remember where IMAP stores your email. This makes it VERY easy for the government to dig into your private life without invading your home where you generally have some legal protections. He has been ordered to justify using IMAP instead of SMTP using SPAM as an excuse. How else do you explain his irrationality?
I like to apply Hanlon's Razor to such questions. Hanlon's Razor states, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." While I don't doubt that most governments have a tendancy to invade the privacy of individuals and (more generally) expand their powers over time, I've seen them make bad rules and laws based on pure ignorance so many times that I think that's the most likely cause for a lot of it. Also, for what it's worth, I'm not sure I buy the explanation of why the UN would want to push people towards IMAP. While I think IMAP has much better support than POP3 for leaving messages on the server if you want to do that, it is easy to use the IMAP protocol just like POP3: IMAP supports the ability to see a list of messages, fetch a message, and delete a message just like POP3 does, so you can easily use an IMAP mailbox as a temporary maildrop just like you do with POP3. - Logan
