On Sun, 07 Sep 2003 12:56:04 +0800 Shelby Moore <coolpage@earthlink.net> wrote: > > What you are saying IMO, is that you can't force bulk emailers or spammers > to use opt-in. Let's be even clearer. What's being claimed is that you can't force bulk emailers to send their email via "pull" technology (whether this means providing their own POP servers, IMAP servers, NNTP servers, web servers, whatever) while everyone else can still use "push". And the question isn't really whether bulk mail can be statistically distinguished from non-bulk mail (since that's really just a matter of whether you can get people to adopt a definition of "bulk" in terms of externally visible traffic properties) - the question is whether you can enforce that rule. IMHO - most recipients don't want to get their mail that way (and many of the deployed user agents don't support it), most senders don't want the increased burden of providing POP/IMAP/NNTP/web servers and the necessary customer support, and there are enough ISPs that derive significant revenue from selling bandwidth to spammers that it would be extremely difficult to get them all to enforce this. In short: nobody has sufficient incentive to adopt this. Of course there's nothing wrong with defining another way to distribute bulk mail that people can use if they wish. If it works well, some people will use it. The stretch is to insist that everybody do it this way.