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

> 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.

My obfuscation technique would eliminate both of those benefits to 
spammers (by multiplying bandwith usage over current levels & filling 
log files with useless information), but would require modifying MTAs 
to retrieve every email they handle while masquerading as an MUA. So 
definitely not an ideal solution, but a solution nonetheless. If you 
can poke holes in it, please do.

Nathan