Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote: ...So far on this thread, we have heard from none of the "large-scale mail carriers", although we have heard that the spam problem is costing them millions of dollars a year. That should be a clue to the IETF list. If there is a problem that is affecting a company to the tune of millions of dollars a year, and that company thinks that the problem could be solved, they would spend that much money to solve it. Please note that they aren't.
Well, perhaps it's more accurate to say "if they thought it could be solved by working with all those nice and entusiastic folks on the IETF general discussion list"... ;-)
We disagree here. For the millions of dollars that they are losing, they would come up with the solution with the IETF or not. They haven't.
> I have spoken to some of these heavily-affected companies (instead ofjust hypothesizing about them). Their answers were all the same: they don't believe the problem is solvable for the amount of money that they are losing. They would love to solve the spam problem: not only would doing so save them money, it would get them new income. Some estimate this potential income to be hundreds of millions of dollars a year, much more than they are losing on spam. But they believe that the overhead of the needed trust system, and the cost of losing mail that didn't go through the trust system, is simply too high.
You might disagree with them, and based on that disagreement you might write a protocol. But don't do so saying "the big carriers will want this" without much more concrete evidence as to their desires.
Paul, are you aware of any concrete numbers here?
Yes.
I've looked through the IMC site, but the only references to cost seem to be in a report from the late 90's, with no hard data. If not, this might be something the IMC could consider pulling together? I'd agree that there's way too much hand-waving going on here on this point...
All my discussions were not for attribution. Large mail carriers don't want their competitors to know how many users they actually have (as compared to the highly inflated numbers that various analysts say they have), and they certainly don't want their competitors knowing how much they are spending on dealing with spam. "Our company spends more per user on fighting spam than OtherBigCarrier!"
In aggregate, then numbers were in the tens of millions of dollars US, and that was more than two years ago. I would be shocked if the numbers were much lower now, given the greatly increasing amount of spam and the level-or-increasing number of customers.
Again, the summary is that these folks are hurting badly enough to throw highly-qualified full-time staff on the problem, and they don't believe any of the solutions that have been presented so far will save them enough money. If they thought differently, they would have deployed them by now so that they could save those millions of dollars.
--Paul Hoffman, Director --Internet Mail Consortium