Hello from a new subscriber was Re: Just Wondering...

Shae Matijs Erisson <[email protected]> Tue, 13 Apr 2004 18:37:12 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.mail.im2000
Message-ID <[email protected]>
James Craig Burley <[email protected]> writes:

>   "Sure is quiet out there."
>
>   "Yeah, too quiet."
>
> (Or did I unsubscribe myself from the list and not remember doing it?
> Can't seem to find an up-to-date archive....)

I just subscribed, haven't been able to find an archive either, and didn't
really want to request the messages one at a time. If there is an archive, I'd
like to have the link.

Anyway, I had this same idea completely independently, Darius Bacon pointed me
to this project.

Are there any implementations, full or partial?

I haven't seen any details for an implementation, so I've been slowly writing
my own in Haskell.

Here's what I wrote before I knew about this project, how does it differ from
im2000? I would appreciate any suggestions for improvement.

"""
I'm convinced there's a better way to do email.

In short, Only send 80 char max notifications, and make the sender keep the
email on their own server for the receiver to go get by himself.

The problem with spam is that once it's in the system, it's totally trusted,
and the system bears the cost of transport and storage.
If you shift the cost to the sender, spam won't be economically viable.
If spammers have to hold spam on their own servers, the servers will quickly be
found out and blacklisted.
The greatest benefit is that real geeks like us will shutdown or blacklist spam
server before grandma and joe q. public do their weekly email check.


Q: What about Spammed Notifications?
A: will still be an improvement over full spam emails, and takes a lot less
   time to download.


Q: Will mailing list servers require lots of extra space?
A: not if you consider them mailing list archives as well.

Q: How does this work for the average user that has an account with an ISP?
A: You send your email to your ISP via SMTP, just as always. Your email remains
   there on the server, and the server sends a notification to the final
   destination. The final destination then chooses when it wants to pick up the
   mail from the ISP's server.

As for receiving email, your client will need to pick up from many different
POP3 servers, rather than just picking up from one as now.

User Stories:

A Spammer registers an account with an ISP, and sends lots of Spam.
Result: That spam remains on the server until the spammer uses up their storage
quota and flags the sysadmin (who should immediately kill the account and any
non-picked up spam)
Or the public blacklists list the user@host once the first few spams have been
picked up, and that user@host is not accepted by clients that check blacklists.

A spammer sets up their own server, and sends lots of Spam.
Result: the server is listed in the public blacklists, and is not accepted by
clients that check blacklists.

A spammer tries to forge an email sender.
Result: your client can't pick up an email from a server that doesn't exist. 
"""
-- 
Shae Erisson  -  putStr $ fix("HELLO\n"++)  -  http://www.ScannedInAvian.org/
OSDir: Community building... interesting... what's the secret sauce?
Limi: Irresponsible sleep patterns.
-- Alexander Limi, one of the Plone founders http://osdir.com/Article199.phtml