Re: Feedback on Hypertext Mail Protocol (a.k.a. Stub Email)

On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 11:30:31AM -0600, Charles Cazabon wrote:
> Nathan Cheng <[email protected]> wrote:
> > So then perhaps the only benefit of IM2000 schemes over today's 
> > situation is that you get to see the Subject/Sender/To of the email 
> > before retrieving the entire email?
> 
> No, the prime benefit is that mail is stored by the sender.  
> 
> That means the spammer bears the cost of hosting the mail, so spam becomes
> less economically attractive.

I argued on my critique page that IM2000 would make spamming far cheaper for
the spammer. They only need to store *one* copy of the spam body on their
disk, and then send out as many notifications as they like. Furthermore,
inactive recipients will not retrieve the mail, so their bandwidth costs
will be minimised too.

Given that they will write their own IM2000 message store optimised for
spamming, they can choose either to send out the same opaque key to all
recipients, or to send out different ones. The latter case lets them track
who has read their spam and when, for a cost of a few bytes of storage per
recipient. A cheap 250GB drive holds a *lot* of recipient information.

Regards,

Brian.