michel@arneill-py.sacramento.ca.us ("Michel Py") writes:
> > i'm wasting my time because i want this problem looked at more broadly.
>
> Are you in agreement with what Noel wrote earlier WRT involving some
> money in sending email is the only deterrent that spammers that pollute
> our inbox and now our mailing list would understand?
no. that's one possible avenue but i reject the word "only". to put it
another way, the problem isn't deterring spammers or even preventing abuse,
but rather designing a new interpersonal batch communications system (ibcs?)
which allows a receiving party to accept or reject inbound traffic with some
kind of confidence in the identity of the sender, the intent of the relay or
proxy, and the value (to the sender) of the reception.
i've heard several calls to move this discussion elsewhere. since my goal
is to get ietf to take this seriously (and if you think the asrg is serious
then you are not paying attention or you don't understand the issues) and do
another turn of the same crank that produced mime and esmtp. the industry
has the talent, especially companies like sendmail and projects like postfix,
to design an "ibcs" that's suitable for today's diverse internet population.
to give y'all an idea of what's technically and philosophically unworkable
about the smtp model, look at the isoid "mua/mta" split and note that the
idea of an mta working on an mua's behalf but operating asynchronously (and
therefore accepting and locally queuing inbound or outbound traffic without
reference to the mua policy of the sender and especially the recipient) is
just flat out unworkable, no matter how it might've looked on a whiteboard.
my own ideas have to do with trustbrokers, certificates for both mailboxes
and transfer/relay agents, and provable confidence in subjective values.
but maybe all that's just crap, and what's actually necessary and
sufficient would have a completely different look/feel to it than anything
i've yet considered.
we (the e-mail producing/consuming community) have the technology, we have
the collective wit and wisdom, we have the proven commercial value of the
service. what we lack, dear ietf, is simply: leadership.
--
Paul Vixie