[lug] Getting mail out of the Qwest/MSN mire

[Bear Giles]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:

>I've said it before and I'll say it again: The spam problem won't go away
>until it starts getting treated like the attack on the Internet that it
>actually is.
>  
>
I was reading a summary of spam solutions a few days ago, including 
protocols, and one of them was using a 'pull' model instead of a 'push' 
model. You would still send announcements, but the message itself would 
reside on the sender's box.

There are some benefits, e.g., the ability to 'undo' sent mail in many 
cases, and from a broader economic perspective it definitely makes sense 
to put the cost on the sender, not the recipient. It's much more like 
other standard services - you pull data from a website, ftp site, DNS, etc.

But it still has some problems (e.g., how do you handle mail that needs 
to be anonymous, e.g, by whistleblowers, informants and abuse victims) 
and then there's the transition period. How many people are still 
running Win9x or Win2k? How do they get their mail?

>In other places we'd call a 20x signal to noise ratio a DDoS.
>  
>
I remember being slack-jawed at the argument, a few years ago, that spam 
only accounted for a few percent of mail traffic so what's the problem? 
It's easily dismissed by the recipient.

The person didn't get the fact that it might have been a few percent at 
the time, but how long would it be until there was as much spam as 
legitimate mail? Until there was 10x more spam than legitimate mail? 
Until it was legitimate mail, not spam, that was a few percent of the 
overall volume?