Re: Inexpensive anti-spamware/anti-verminware tactic

>James Craig Burley <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >Mail system admins will prefer it.  It's a lot easier to tell a customer they
>> >have to pay for outgoing traffic than for incoming, unsolicited traffic.
>> 
>> That's true.
>> 
>> It remains to be seen whether too many customers will insist on having
>> storage for incoming, unsolicited traffic anyway, so they can be
>> assured of being able to read email that's sitting in their in-boxes.
>
>Huh?

...so, when a customer goes online and is told about new messages that
have come in overnight, that customer is assured of access to the
contents of each and every message, which is something to which he has
long been accustomed under the existing SMTP regime.

>> (I wonder if there might be any lawsuits claiming false advertising
>> related to IM2000: "My ISP said I didn't have to pay for incoming,
>> unsolicited traffic; they didn't tell me that meant I'd often lose
>> access to incoming messages, even after I read them!")
>
>If you want to keep copies of your incoming mail, your MUA will keep a local
>copy even after it has instructed the originating message store to unpin it,
>just like your MUA keeps copies of messages it retrieves from a POP3 server
>(whether or not it deletes them from the POP3 server).

The link in the chain I'm referring to is the point at which a message
goes *into* the POP3 server.

My MUA cannot possibly have a local copy at that point, since it
hasn't yet retrieved it.  It's still in my "in-box", so to speak.

But when I go to retrieve it, if I want to ensure that it's there,
I'll have told my ISP to either cache, or accept and unpin, all
incoming email (meeting certain criteria, presumably).

So, unless my selection criteria, which my ISP will have to apply even
when I'm *offline*, somehow includes only *solicited* traffic...

...I'll be paying for incoming, unsolicited traffic.  Even though,
strictly speaking, I won't "have" to.

>Nowhere in Jonathon's writeup does it say anything about mail storage after
>you tell the originating message store to un-pin a message.  The only time a
>message you've read can "disappear" on you is if (1) you're still reading it
>directly out of the remote originating message store, (2) your MUA is not
>keeping a copy of it locally once it has retrieved it, and (3) the message
>expires out of the originating message store.

Agreed, though it can also "disappear" on you before Step 1, in which
case you haven't ever been able to read it, even though you have been
shown summary information ("From: ...", at least) on it by your MUA.

That, and the disappearance of messages already *skimmed* but not yet
fully read (and that therefore might be UBM), thus not yet unpinned,
is the scenario that concerns people like myself, in that, if too many
IM2000 users worry enough about it, they'll instruct their ISPs to, in
effect, defeat this very advantage of IM2000 by storing their incoming
unsolicited email after all.

-- 
James Craig Burley
Software Craftsperson
<http://www.jcb-sc.com>