Wave of the Future (Spam)

SPAM, aside from its unfortunate status as completely unpaid advertising, is not a terrible thing. What's terrible about it is that when the time comes that internet traffic has to be paid for on a bit-by-bit basis so that the badwidth is paid-for, it is likely that the recipients will have to pay, rather than the senders. For that reason, we should all be making a lot of noise to ensure that it's the senders and not the recipients that have to pay for mail. Mail is the vehicle that SPAM uses, newsgroups excepted, and since newsgroup managers can afford (only because of the costs to them for bandwidth) to trace the SPAM back to its source and reject it before forwarding it, it won't be as big a problem there. Mail should, therefore, be traceable back to its originator, and all methods of spoofing the sender's IP address should be defeated in some way. This means MAJOR work on the protocol layers from the IP/ICMP layer upward, and that may not happen for a while. It's MUCH easier to charge the recipient for mail delivery, and while that's BACKWARD from the logic, the organizations that cooked up most of the internet procedural arsenal have always chosen easy/adequate over difficult in any form, even when .0001% of additional effort/complexity would have added 10000x more functionality/reliability. This is what happens when a committee does things, and that's what runs the internet. This thing won't be fixed unless some lone individual, incredibly bright, imaginative, and altruistic, but otherwise underutilized, does it. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sellam Ismail" <foo(a)siconic.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, June 22, 2001 8:42 AM Subject: Re: Wave of the Future (Spam)