Re: On the spam problem...

>I believe this next generation mail system needs to
>address the reasons that spam exists, not try to address the symptom of
>those reasons being that it does exist and must be dealt with.

The reasons spam and vermin exists include, first and foremost: the
fact that people have stuff to sell, causes to advance, and/or a
desire to destroy or at least deface things; second: the fact that
email is one of the least expensive, least intrusive, least
environmentally destructive, most accessible, and least "risky" means
to reach a lot of people.

NG mail can't fix or improve people.  Therefore, to address the
reasons spam exists, it must do something about the second set in the
above paragraph.

That means it'd have to be designed *intentionally* to be one or more
of the following, compared to today's email:

  -  More expensive

  -  More intrusive

  -  More environmentally destructive

  -  Less accessible

  -  More risky

Since it's inherently a voluntary-recipient medium, it can't be made
more intrusive, so it'll still compare favorably to the telephone and
door-to-door soliciting.

Since it normally shares available, electronic resources, it can't be
made much less environmentally destructive than it already is, so
it'll still compare favorably to mass mailings.

So cross those two out.

The three that remain end up being the issues most thoughtful people
raise to address spam:

  "Let's make sending email more expensive."  In other words, require
  a kind of postage concept to be included, or require the sender to
  always bear a greater burden on transmission than it does today.

  "Let's require personal authentication to use NG mail."  That's
  really what people tend to raise as a means to reduce accessibility,
  though there are other approaches to that which are, in my opinion,
  also not properly part of NG mail.

  "Let's pass and enforce laws against abuse of email."  This
  addresses the issue of increasing the risk.

The only ones of these that pertain to how NG mail itself works are
the expense and authentication issues.  (Passing and enforcing laws is
hardly the province of RFC's.)

That's why we're seeing some pretty heated arguments over those two
issues, and little else (except maybe for compatibility issues, which
actually perversely figure into the accessibility issue).

Making NG mail capable of being just as cheap (or even cheaper) than
today's mail, while permitting fine-grained, per-recipient,
per-sender, and per-transporter (per-MTA) control over "postage",
addresses the expense issue without necessarily making NG mail itself
more expensive.  E.g. a recipient could choose to receive
otherwise-untrusted email from only those sites that it trusts to
charge postage to deliver mail from sources those sites don't trust --
a potential business opportunity, I would think.

Similarly, making it capable of being just as blase about
authentication as is today's system, while permitting fine-grained
control over authentication, addresses that issue, again, without
making NG mail itself require everyone to obtain some kind of
additional authorization.

-- 
James Craig Burley
Software Craftsperson
<http://www.jcb-sc.com>
--Fix qmail's qmail-smtpd so it doesn't crash on a big header line:--
		   <http://www.qmail.org/netqmail/>