At 03:46 PM 4/15/98 +0300, you wrote:
[snip]
>>The right way
>>is to make it uneconomical for them to send spam. How? I don't really
>>know, I just ignore it, sort of like background static noise on a
>>shortwave radio.
[snip]
>Spam should be illegal. The commercialization of the Internet's what we
>needed for a long time: a worldwide information resource. Allowing people
>to profit by it (by ads, etc.) gives you more information available, and a
>wider user base.
[snip]
How difficult would it be to establish a standardized trust model for email
transactions? Think about the way AOL Instant Messanger and ICQ work. If
you want to talk with someone, you have to contact them first to establish
trust, which may be revoked at any time. I suppose it could be done on a
limited basis right now with existing tools such as procmail, or even
Eudora and other clients that include filtering capability. Require someone
who wants to email your account to fill in a form before they get your
magic number, etc. Emails without the magic number could be bounced or sent
an autoresponse detailing how to establish trust. The object would be to
force anyone who wanted to email you to manually provide verifiable contact
information before they could get through to you.
Most of us have probably done the same thing with answering machines and
Caller ID. My wife and I installed two CID boxes and an aswering machine a
couple months ago and were shocked when we realized that we were ignoring
about 90% of the calls we had previously been answering on any given day,
because the caller was "Unknown Name, Unknown Number" (as we like to call
them, "U - N - U - N") and these UNUN callers rarely leave a message, I
suppose because they know we wouldn't be interested in talking with them
anyway.
If such a standard were properly designed and integrated into the existing
mail protocols it would have the potential of eliminating spam all together.
That's all I have to say about that.
--
David Wollmann |
dwollmann_at_ibmhelp.com | Support for legacy IBM products.
DST ibmhelp.com Technical Support | Data, document and file conversion for IBM
http://www.ibmhelp.com/ | legacy file and media formats.
Received on Wed Apr 15 1998 - 11:55:36 BST