Problem with your 'Solution'

Problem with your 'Solution'

Posted May 6, 2004 23:37 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803)
In reply to: Problem with your 'Solution' by mmarsh
Parent article: 82% of email is spam

Dan Bernstein made the proposal, not me. Granted, his page isn't that detailed. If you Google for "IM2000" you can find a few other more specific proposals.

> How is this different than a spam where the body is essentially just an image tag (or a redirect) to an advertisement on a remote server?

That would still end up as an email in someone's box. An IM2000 spam would have a subject, but may be unavailable upon mail check. Even though that type of spam is "short", it's still far better that it never reaches the recipient, to make spamming less profitable.

> Combine that with an ISP that just doesn't care about bandwidth usage

I do think it would be detectable, and any ISP that simply didn't care would be blacklisted.

> but B has a .forward file passing it along to bar.com. I've had forwarding chains of about four hops, and I suspect there are many people with longer chains. Does each hop have to cache the message?

Couple possibilities ... 1) each hop caches the message, 2) each hop notifies the originating ISP of the new recipient. That may have privacy concerns though.

> What about messages of the type "Our server will be down for maintenance on Thursday"?

That would be something to think about. This really does depend on mail servers being reliable. But, for the most part, they are.

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