Re: Thinking outside the box

Marc Perkel wrote:
> OK - let's think outside the box. Let's pretend e,ail as we know is
> going away and we are going to create an entirely new system from
> scratch. Nothing has to be compatible. How would we do it right?

As long as we're interested on the spam problem, there are two things to 
be clearly defined.

* One of the goals of email, as it exists nowadays, is freedom. Freedom 
to be able to write to any one in the world.  This means, I'm just a 
"joe" guy in France and I know the email address of USA president. So, 
nothing shall prevent me to send him a message. Shall this idea remain 
in the new hypothetical system ?

* What's spam ? Or better, what's the definition of messages I don't 
want to receive. Either way, it's the final recipient who shall be able 
do decide what kind of message he wants to reach his mailbox.

The second item is related to abusive advertisement. Nowadays, the old 
traditional spam (porn, meds, ...) is quite easy to filter. A little 
harder is all abusive advertisements sent by marketers. If you ask to 
filtering solution vendors, they'll tell you that this isn't spam, but 
no matter what they say, I don't want to receive ads and I'm in the 
right to decide that. This is why all filter evaluations about mail 
filtering have no value as they don't include legal marketing messages.

Only to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, we had to change the 
email address of our IT hotline as most messages received there were 
messages sent by respectable marketers, messages ranging from pet food 
to sex shop sales for mother's day.






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