Tony writes: > And that would be because they can't do it in > isolation. AOL, to cite one example, does a lot of things in isolation. They don't seem to care if the rest of the Internet goes along, nor do they wait for any system-wide standards to be put in place before they act unilaterally. So I don't think that is a problem. > Taken another way, how would the IETF react if the > large carriers decided to go off and solve this problem > amongst themselves with an undocumented protocol? They already have, with open-relay lists and "residential" blacklists and so on. They don't care what the IETF thinks about it, and I don't see much reaction in turn on the part of the IETF, either. > I predict there would be an outcry that the big > players were ignoring standards and bullying the > market place. And what would that change? Would AOL start letting small businesses send e-mail to its customers again? > The real cost is not in the big carrier equipment or > engineering, it is in the millions of person hours > per day lost to configuring filters, waiting for the > delivery of what gets past the filters, and hitting > delete ~100 times. That isn't millions of hours per day. I get hundreds of spam messages a day, and it only takes me a minute or two each day to delete them; often not even that. The filters are set up just once. I think there is a great tendency to confuse annoyance with real, tangible losses (of time or money). I find television commercials to be a tremendous annoyance, but they don't cause me any losses. And it's interesting that nobody seems to object to them, even though television programs are interrupted literally every few minutes by them (which, when you think about it, is exceedingly bizarre).