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

[Lee Woodworth]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 11:05:28AM -0600, Bear Giles wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> That sounds suspiciously like DJB's Internet Mail 2000 proposal:
> 
>    http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
> 
> It's an interesting idea, but entirely moot.  We can't get people to switch
> to using signed e-mail, how are we going to get people to switch to
> entirely new protocols?  sendmail, postfix, exim, MS, Stalker, Hotmail,
> gmail, Eudora, mutt, pine, there are thousands of people who would have to
> make huge changes to make it happen.
> 
> We're likely to switch to IPv6 before we switch to another e-mail protocol.
> It's that bad.  ;-/
> 
> It's also not clear how something like this would help the spam situation.
> When this proposal was written, the spam landscape was very different.  For
> example, how does this proposal help in a world where a million PCs are
> taken over by spammers for their own use?
> 

Interesting isn't it, that the major cell service providers have a serious
interest in preventing their customers from getting spammed (aka telemarketing).
Maybe its because the cell users will attribute a direct cost (minutes used out
of a quota) to a spam call and will blame the service provider for not protecting
them. For email users, the cost of spam is indirect.