RESTMail

[Justin Mason]

Jeff Bone said:
> 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.

Actually, JB has a point.  There's been a few similar proposals, using
protocols like RSS to do "legit bulk mail", given legit bulk mailers'
current problems with spamfilters.  It makes a lot of sense, especially
since subscribers no longer *have* to subscribe and unsubscribe -- they
control whether or not a poll happens on *their* desktop anyway.

But quite a few of them *like* email, and couldn't even be bothered
setting up basic anti-spam "bonus points" measures like rDNS on their mail
servers -- so the chances of them setting up RSS (or whatever) are slim.

--j.