Re: draft-lilly-from-optional-01.txt

On Thu February 24 2005 17:23, [email protected] wrote:

> Unfortunately this is just not the way things are headed. Users are
> increasingly not able to control these sorts of actions being done on their
> behalf. For example, Sun filters all incoming mail and summarily discards
> everything it thinks is spam. (In fact a recent misconfiguration led to a bunch
> of mail being discarded incorrectly.) I have absolutely no control over this -
> no way to change filter threshholds, no personal whitelist, no Bayesian
> training, no option to file spam in a spam folder, nothing. And while it is
> perhaps true that I wouldn't want and have no business receiving anonymous mail
> sent to my Sun account, I deal with large ISP setups  all the time and I can
> tell you that many if not most of them are similarly set up and are similarly
> inflexible.

I understand, and have a similar situation.  What I had in mind
for recipients who might reasonably expect anonymous mail would
be agencies getting reports from "whistleblowers", e.g. US OSHA.
 
> Of course it is hard to tell when the ubiquity of such setups reaches a point
> where it truly compromises the general ability to send anonymous email.

Or indeed any email.

> But my 
> guess is that if we haven't passed that point yet we're about to.

Some observations:

o mail used to be reasonably reliable; now an over-aggressive spam
  filter is likely to cause non-spam to disappear
o other spam-related "solutions", are so obnoxious that they
  discourage correspondence via email
o spam filters frequently mangle messages, especially MIME
  messages, to the point that content is unusable

So, sure, some anonymous email will probably fall into a black
hole.  That happens to some non-anonymous email.

My conclusion is that overzealousness in the fight against spam
is as much a detriment to utility of email communication as spam
itself is.  And I suspect things will get worse before they get
better.  In the meantime, though, we shouldn't avoid solving
existing problems where solutions are possible.