[extropy-chat] Re: SPAM (was Depressing Thought. from Laurence of Berkeley)

[Rik van Riel]

On Fri, 7 Nov 2003 kevinfreels at hotmail.com wrote:

> I don't think all unsolicited email advertisements should be banned. The
> important part is getting the subject lines correct. If these were
> correct, I could easily filter out what I didn;t want.

1) Spam volume is already 70% of mail on many mail servers,
   encouraging spam is bound to make the S/N ratio of email
   so low that the medium by itself is next to useless.

2) If you filtered out all the well behaved advertisements,
   which you would need in order to read your mail, you'd
   still have the badly behaving ones you have today.

> I don;t quite understand everything about how the headers work, but it
> seems to me that there is a layer missing in the protocols for email.
> Maybe an added layer that would seperate all email into a few categories
> such as PERSONAL, BUSINESS, AND ADVERTISEMENT would be a good idea.

See last year's april fools day RFC, the one about the Evil
bit in IP packets.

You don't truly believe that people will only send you the
mail in the way you want it to be sent, do you?

If you do, your belief conflicts with your mailbox ...

cheers,

Rik
-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan