Why We Still Need The Comments On Slashdot

Every ten minutes or so, it seems, someone proposes a scheme for ridding the world of spam. That's the email kind, not the tasty dead-burnt-animal-in-a-tin kind.

The only problem is that in almost every case, the person proposing this magical solution knows absolutely nothing about how email actually works. Having helped set up an ISP, having written a mailserver of my own (used internally for several years, but long since abandoned), and being responsible for four mailservers right now, I have learnt at least a little bit.

And here are two of the things I have learned:

One, your proposal has been suggested before. Probably before you even knew what the Internet was.

Two, the reason that you have never heard it discussed and so think it is wonderfully original and clever is that it won't work, can't work, is impossible to implement, and that all of this is immediately obvious to anyone with the faintest idea about the actual implementation of the global email system.

The latest dumb idea comes from Microsoft, a Premium Dumb Idea Providerâ„¢, their friends at Yahoo (Google Ate Our Lunchâ„¢), and is presented by The New York Times (We Suck, But You Have To Register Anywayâ„¢).

I could go into a lengthy and entertaining-only-to-geeks rant about why this latest proposal is utterly dumbfoundingly wrong-headed and at the same time one of the purest examples of corporate greed to surface in years - they want you to pay for email - but one of the posters at Slashdot has saved me the trouble:

Your company advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(x) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:00 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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