A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

[Sunder]

That's not the fucking point.  What about people sending emails from two
way pagers such as blackberries? cell phones? danger hiptop's? other such
devices?  handsprings with the cell phone plug in, cell phones that are
also pilots? something sitting in an embedded controller that has a tiny
tcp stack and sends status emails?

Not every object capable of sending email is going to be reprogrammable,
nor will it have the proper CPU power to sit there and crunch a problem.

Further, what about anonymous mail from remailers?  no return address
there.


This is a lame way to get rid of spam and puts strain on the sender to
prove he's not a spammer.  Do you really think someone is going to sit
there and do a puzzle in her head just so she can send you an email from
her blackberry just because RIM or whatever network hasn't adopted your
pet anti-spam authentication project?  No, she'll give up and not send you
the email.

If something is a suspected spam, it's not necessarily correct to have it
prove itself by replying to a challenge.  It may not be possible to do so,
or may be a hassle to the sender.  It's upto you to set your filters
correctly or make sure that things that aren't spams aren't marked as
such. 

Either way, this is not going to work.  It sounds good in theory, sure,
but in real life, who's going to bother going through the hassles?  How
many millions of ISP's are you going to have to convince?  How many
thousands of SMTP servers and mail clients are going to need to change?


And even if you do succeede in making the above happen, which you won't,
what makes you think the spammers won't just pool their resources together
and buy clusters of machines to authenticate themselves past such schemes?  
Intel hardware is very cheap these days and getting cheaper.

They'll just raise their costs and charge their clients more for "Super
duper guaranteed to be delivered past the spam filters spams."  $1 for a
million spams, $100 for a thousand guaranteed to be delivered past
the filter spams.  

Think like they do.  Thinking like a geek is great.  But if you want real
people to use your stuff, the hassle factor is a huge thing to overcome.  

And if the spammers simply get around the problem, then what?  Pass laws?

Ok, how are your CA or TX anti-spam laws going to apply to some shithole
ISP in Afghanistan?  So you find their IP's, so what?  Sue them?  Go
ahead.



----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
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