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

On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 01:38:25PM -0800, Nathan Cheng wrote:
> Then final destination MTAs like Yahoo could offer a service to paying 
> email customers to request every email message 10000 times before 
> inboxing it

... and find themselves blackholed by the rest of the Internet for wasting
stupid amounts of legitimate senders' bandwidth?

You could already do the same with URLs embedded in spams - i.e. fetch the
page contents 10,000 times before displaying them to the user.

If the spammer's webpage is hosted on some 3rd party server (typical 'free
homepages' service) then the losers are:

(a) the free homepages service. "Serves them right for hosting a spammer's
page" you say. I'm not sure that's true, but if it is, there are less
wasteful ways of blackholing the site.

(b) the machine(s) fetching the page 10,000 times, who between them will
have to bear the bandwidth cost too.

In fact, the only person who doesn't lose out is the spammer.

Regards,

Brian.