Re: Why are we here? What are our goals?

On Feb 1, 2004, at 12:48 PM, John W. Noerenberg II wrote:

> Well, now you've gone and made the tacit assumption explicit, 
> Iljitsch.  Should it be possible for a sender using a romanized script 
> to address a message destined for a receiver using an oriental script 
> (to pick one specific situation)?
>

Given that it's a common occurrence today, it needs to exist. Think of 
all of the asian-native speakers that are subscribed to various 
english-language mailing lists for various open source projects based 
in north america or europe.

Many people are bilingual, especially outside of the U.S. And many of 
us communicate globally already, by finding a common tongue (english or 
whatever), which may or may not be 'native' for either of us, or for 
our operating systems.

And then there are programs that generate e-mail. How many languages 
does Mailman support in translations? What's its 'native' language, 
anyway?

> robots programmed to abuse the mail system. I now have decent 
> anti-spam software, but the trouble is that I still have to go through 
> all rejected messages to see whether there are any false positives.

not so silly question: the modern postal system dates back to Benjamin 
Franklin, and paper-based mail dates back to the creation of paper (and 
before that, there was probably clay-based cuneiform mail, but the 
messenger rates higher) -- and have you ever made the mistake of 
throwing away a bill, or opening up an ad thinking it was something 
else?

false positives and false negatives. And that system's had hundreds to 
thousands of years to be perfected. So -- let's start by realizing that 
100% perfection only exists in theory.

> Receivers should be able to distinguish messages specifically 
> addressed to them from those that are not.
>

Not quite right. Try this:

Receiving systems should be given the information needed to decide 
whether to accept the message, and recipient users should be given the 
information needed to decide whether to open/read the message in a way 
that's trustable and reliable.

"Specifically addressed to them" isn't really the answer. "Whether they 
want it" is. The former excludes stuff like multi-cast messaging, for 
instance or, if you want to be pedantic (I don't) mailing list 
messages, since those are addressed to a mail list they happen to be a 
member of. The latter is what you're really looking for: "someone 
offered me this message. do I accept it?"

Addressing is just one one aspect of acceptance. after all, the reason 
all that spam ends up in your mailbox is because it *is* addressed to 
you -- it's the sender information that's forged that's the problem.