Re: On the spam problem...

At 01:01 PM 1/30/2004, Dustin D. Trammell wrote:
>If we are successful in designing a mail system that provides 
>traceability, sender authentication, and other protection mechanisms, will 
>we even need to worry about spam?

I would say "yes", because there is not a uniform definition of spam, nor 
universal agreement that spam is bad. You think it is bad, and I think it 
is bad, but the guy sending it seems to disagree. I have been to the folks 
at my company that send spam (he bows his head sheepishly in absolute 
shame), and they tell me that the email they send is very closely targeted 
and resides within a vendor relationship, so that (for example) if I 
download a new driver for an aironet card from Cisco's site, it is 
*legally* accepted for them to send me occasional mail related to wireless 
networking. They are my vendor in some sense, and within that relationship 
the rules are different than the rules for people promoting v1@gr@.

So, from my perspective, you cannot eliminate unsolicited email of any 
nature. But you can apply a policy to it, if you have appropriate hooks to 
define your policy in terms of.

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