On 4/11/23 11:17, John Levine wrote:
Email is different from all of those because it is by design easy to send a bazillion messages in a short time. Spam only works if you can send vast amounts quickly and cheaply, which is why we see it in e-mail and robocalls and to some degree SMS.
I don't think that "easy to send a bazillion messages in a short time" was a goal of email's design.
I do think that decentralization was a goal of Internet email's design, or at least, of the ARPAnet and Internet's design and thus of the environment that ARPAnet and Internet email inherited. And it's harder to do fair rate limiting in a decentralized environment than in a centrally-controlled one.
Keith
