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

> 
> > [...] On the other hand, recipients who might
> > reasonably expect to receive anonymous messages would almost
> > certainly not use anti-spam software that discards such messages.
> 

>
> 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'd like to add to this that commercial filter providers consider
their rules a competitive trade secret. Thus, until there is an outcry
against closed source filters (which may never happen), users will
never have the kind of control over receipt of anonymous messages that
Bruce is positing. Moreover, most users have no idea how the email system
works in the first place, and wouldn't know what they are missing.

-- 
Laird Breyer.