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Bernstein is an incredibly smart guy. But he's also an example of how the social stuff matters. His software would run the internet if he put a little more e

by lsc 11y ago

Bernstein is an incredibly smart guy. But he's also an example of how the social stuff matters. His software would run the internet if he put a little more effort into the social/political side of things. The big problem with IM2000 is that it doesn't solve the real problems. It's focused on the economics of storage of mail, which, yeah, are a thing for a few mail administrators, but generally is considered less important than the spam-filtering problem in general. I mean, I'm not willing to pay for infinite storage, but I certainly would be willing to pay the cost of receiving 100x my current monthly spam load if I didn't have to read any of it. Maybe even 1000x. The major benefit of the IM2000 standard is that if you can squash the spammer's mail servers, you squash the mail in question, which actually could change things, because it would mean that spammers would need to control the servers they use to send for longer than they do now.

staunch 11y ago
> ... because it would mean that spammers would need to control the servers they use to send for longer than they do now. This is the reason IM2000 is exciting. Spammers only survive using hit and run tactics. We might see a 99% reduction in total generated spam.
- lsc 11y ago
  Really? More than 99% of the junk email in my box is from "legitimate" senders who use their own mailservers. The truth of the matter is that it's already pretty easy to block the hit and run spammers. Most of the junk that gets through is sent by people with the resources to bully the spamfilters into accepting it.
  - staunch 11y ago
    Spam is viagra ads and the like (unsolicited commercial email). Promotional emails from companies you have a relationship with are a different thing. Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam. SMTP is not where email organization should happen. That's what email clients are for. Blocking DoS attacks and spam makes sense. Blocking Amazon Kindle promotions does not.
    - lsc 11y ago
      >Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam. See, you still seem to think that it's a negotiation between the senders and the receivers. My point is that you don't have the right to the end-user's attention. If the end-user wants to hire someone to filter out messages they don't want to read, using whatever criteria for "don't want to read" that they like, this is the user's right. (more relevant to the discussion, the email that is technically spam is pretty easy to block already, so a solution that requires a lot of social/political change is inferior to the technical measures we have in place.)
      - johnmaguire2013 11y ago
        Re-read the bit you quoted. > Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam. i.e. Yes, it should be the user's control, not the hosting company's, not the sending server's.
    - marcosdumay 11y ago
      Spam is anything that clogs my inbox and makes the emails I want to receive harder to find. But I agree, SMTP is not where email organization should happen. Blocking illegitimate senders at the protocol level is the most that should be done, and the blocking of unwanted content should be pushed into a more user oriented layer. Current structure isn't optimal.
    - jschwartzi 11y ago
      If it's all the same to you, it seems to me that everybody and their mother has a daily or bi-daily newsletter advertising things I don't care about. I think maybe 15 companies are responsible for the vast majority of mail arriving in my inbox, and I care for none of it. Marketing routinely mistakes quantity for quality, as if yelling your message louder is sufficient for mindshare. I'm really glad that gmail sorts these emails into a place where I don't have to ignore them, because I used to flag them as spam whether or not I might have accidentally given consent 10 years ago by buying something once. It was making email as useful as physical mail(read: not at all). Just because I bought something from you once does not mean we have a relationship, just as a one-night stand does not entitle you to ask me to help you move.
  - ricardobeat 11y ago
    Your inbox != the internet. The majority of email traffic has been spam for a decade now.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    99% of them have unsubscribe buttons, too.
thoughtexpt 11y ago
That his software does not "run the internet" does not make it any less good. It's there for whoever chooses to use it. That he focuses on the software instead of pandering probably makes his software better than the alternatives that aim to please even the most foolish of users. At least I think so. Maybe I interpreted the proposal incorrectly, but I always saw IM2000 (minus the "notifications") as a "pull" solution. By contrast, conventional email relies on "pushing" spam to the recipient (in practice, a middleman called an "email provider"). A smart IM2000 recipient perhaps would not pull spam from the sender's server. As such, the spam would never enter the network. It would just sit on the sender's server. Therefore, IM2000 not only conserves storage but also conserves bandwidth.
- mike-cardwell 11y ago
  "A smart IM2000 recipient perhaps would not pull spam from the sender's server." Based on what criteria? You wouldn't have the message headers/content, so you couldn't filter based on that. All you can filter on is the IP address. But you can already do that with SMTP by just responding with a 5xx code as soon as the sending server connects anyway... Or you could actually fetch the message and then spam filter it. But then, you may as well use SMTP... What difference does it make which side initiates the TCP connection? If I was a spammer, IM2000 wouldn't concern me one little bit.
kang 11y ago
You might like http://the.mailman.ninja/ http://the.mailman.ninja/

by lsc 11y ago

staunch 11y ago

> ... because it would mean that spammers would need to control the servers they use to send for longer than they do now. This is the reason IM2000 is exciting. Spammers only survive using hit and run tactics. We might see a 99% reduction in total generated spam.

lsc 11y ago
Really? More than 99% of the junk email in my box is from "legitimate" senders who use their own mailservers. The truth of the matter is that it's already pretty easy to block the hit and run spammers. Most of the junk that gets through is sent by people with the resources to bully the spamfilters into accepting it.
- staunch 11y ago
  Spam is viagra ads and the like (unsolicited commercial email). Promotional emails from companies you have a relationship with are a different thing. Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam. SMTP is not where email organization should happen. That's what email clients are for. Blocking DoS attacks and spam makes sense. Blocking Amazon Kindle promotions does not.
  - lsc 11y ago
    >Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam. See, you still seem to think that it's a negotiation between the senders and the receivers. My point is that you don't have the right to the end-user's attention. If the end-user wants to hire someone to filter out messages they don't want to read, using whatever criteria for "don't want to read" that they like, this is the user's right. (more relevant to the discussion, the email that is technically spam is pretty easy to block already, so a solution that requires a lot of social/political change is inferior to the technical measures we have in place.)
    - johnmaguire2013 11y ago
      Re-read the bit you quoted. > Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam. i.e. Yes, it should be the user's control, not the hosting company's, not the sending server's.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    Spam is anything that clogs my inbox and makes the emails I want to receive harder to find. But I agree, SMTP is not where email organization should happen. Blocking illegitimate senders at the protocol level is the most that should be done, and the blocking of unwanted content should be pushed into a more user oriented layer. Current structure isn't optimal.
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    If it's all the same to you, it seems to me that everybody and their mother has a daily or bi-daily newsletter advertising things I don't care about. I think maybe 15 companies are responsible for the vast majority of mail arriving in my inbox, and I care for none of it. Marketing routinely mistakes quantity for quality, as if yelling your message louder is sufficient for mindshare. I'm really glad that gmail sorts these emails into a place where I don't have to ignore them, because I used to flag them as spam whether or not I might have accidentally given consent 10 years ago by buying something once. It was making email as useful as physical mail(read: not at all). Just because I bought something from you once does not mean we have a relationship, just as a one-night stand does not entitle you to ask me to help you move.
- ricardobeat 11y ago
  Your inbox != the internet. The majority of email traffic has been spam for a decade now.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  99% of them have unsubscribe buttons, too.

thoughtexpt 11y ago

That his software does not "run the internet" does not make it any less good. It's there for whoever chooses to use it. That he focuses on the software instead of pandering probably makes his software better than the alternatives that aim to please even the most foolish of users. At least I think so. Maybe I interpreted the proposal incorrectly, but I always saw IM2000 (minus the "notifications") as a "pull" solution. By contrast, conventional email relies on "pushing" spam to the recipient (in practice, a middleman called an "email provider"). A smart IM2000 recipient perhaps would not pull spam from the sender's server. As such, the spam would never enter the network. It would just sit on the sender's server. Therefore, IM2000 not only conserves storage but also conserves bandwidth.

mike-cardwell 11y ago
"A smart IM2000 recipient perhaps would not pull spam from the sender's server." Based on what criteria? You wouldn't have the message headers/content, so you couldn't filter based on that. All you can filter on is the IP address. But you can already do that with SMTP by just responding with a 5xx code as soon as the sending server connects anyway... Or you could actually fetch the message and then spam filter it. But then, you may as well use SMTP... What difference does it make which side initiates the TCP connection? If I was a spammer, IM2000 wouldn't concern me one little bit.

kang 11y ago

You might like http://the.mailman.ninja/ http://the.mailman.ninja/