Re: [anti-spam-wg@localhost] feasibility of antispam actions

[Markus Stumpf <]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 01:05:52AM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
> If you're talking about "customers" as in email receivers, I don't see
> this as an issue.  There is nothing whatever wrong with having
> providers that accept all mail, and picking up the customers that
> prefer their mail unfiltered, with others doing various forms of
> filtering and picking up the customers who like _that_.

What I thought of is e.g. proposals that would require SSL keys for each
and every SMTP connection partner (MUA and MTA). If you as an ISP
enforce this for your customers that want to talk to your MTA and
another ISP doesn't enforce this he may gain benefit as he could say
"you don't want complicated and high priced certificates but your ISP
enforces them? We don't"
The enforcing ISP would then be a "good guy" for about 3 months and
after that he could be a bankrupt guy :( In times when business is hard
and customers change ISPs because they use 50 MB a month and have 5 GB
free but another ISP gives them 6 GB free for the same price the above
example could be a killer argument and inhibit the success of the
proposal.

> Yes...but the latter would, at least to me, be an acceptable outcome;
> I'd be in the no-spam-here part, even if that means giving up email
> connectivity to the "Internet for e-business" and "grandma getting
> birthday-party pictures from Joe and Helen" crowds.  (Not an ideal
> outcome, no.  But an acceptable one.)

This makes my stomach growl :/
If such a split happens providers will start to slap their product
sheets with "you can send email to ... and receive email from ..."
and you need more than one address and provider if your grandma and
you can only send emails via provider A but with you business partner X
you need provider B and for business partner Y you need provider D.
And you have to take care which partner you give which email address,
cause with the wrong address he can't reach you.
Kinda reminds me of the browser war and how they broke the idea behind HTML:

        "Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label
                 on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days,
      before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document
  written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
		   -- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996


	\Maex

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