Throw away the Internet and start over?

[Jeff Bone]

On Tuesday, Apr 22, 2003, at 08:05 US/Central, Russell Turpin wrote:

> Jeff Bone:
>> I think you missed the point.  Go re-read Paul's write up:  it's a 
>> substantial change from "fire-and-forget" to "notify me that I need 
>> to come get something." .. Plus, it's a lot easier to filter / avoid 
>> bogus structured metadata content in the notification .. than it is 
>> to try to semantically classify the content itself, by which time 
>> I've already received and stored it.
>
> I'm not too excited about this. (1)

Okay, look --- the primary intent of RESTmail is not in fact to fight 
spam.  (In fact it was entirely pedantic;  much work needed to make it 
viable.)  There are lots of other reasons that one might want to go 
from a "push it all, store-and-forward, routed" mechanism to "sender 
pushes the headers, receiver pulls the body" mechanism --- and still 
other reasons why having the underlying protocol be HTTP and each 
message have a URI would be a good thing.

It *does* open the door to some different spam-fighting measures, as 
mentioned.  None of these are particularly compelling by themselves, 
you probably do need white listing, etc.  But if you get all wiggy 
about Paul's little sketch because it doesn't tackle the whole 
enchilada, you're missing the point and just being cantankerous.

And you're partially wrong about the economics of spam.  Spam consumes 
lots of resources along the way from sender to your mailbox.  Now the 
current mechanism does not make the spammer pay for those resources --- 
RESTmail or similar at least moves the bar a little bit back towards 
the spammer.  And it would be a lot easier to shut down spammers under 
that sort of scenario than it is today, IMHO.

jb