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cellioThen, the ARPANet became dominant and email was faster and more reliable. Most people using it were "practicioners" of various sorts; the average guy on the street didn't yet have email.
Then two things happened: spam, and widespread email access (making spam even more profitable). Now, almost 10 years after the green-card lawyers created the first piece of spam and AOL sent out its first mass (physical) mailing of software, we're all swimming in spam, and virii, and lures (for the unsuspecting) to "just click here", and the attendant side effects. So we have filters and auto-processing of various sorts, and this month most of us aren't inspecting bounced-message reports because of all the SoBig-generated false ones, so we don't even know if we're seeing all our mail or if the mail we send gets through. Sometimes we have to send messages several times, or actually tell someone "I sent you email", before the recipient actually sees it.
25 years after the rise of UUCP, email is unreliable and slow again. Oops.
Re: Not having problems
Date: 2003-09-24 07:32 am (UTC)Re: Not having problems
Date: 2003-09-24 08:20 am (UTC)Bleh.
Re: Not having problems
Date: 2003-09-24 08:51 am (UTC)Hmm... maybe if E-mail 2.0 required each message to be signed by a PGP key, and each person could get one free one a year. (They'd pay 2^n for each nth one after that; corporations could get 10 corporate keys free, and pay 2^n for each 10 keys afterwards... a company of 30 employees ought to be able to afford a one-time cost of $100...) Of course, there are other problems with this system, but at least you'd be able (ideally) to know that whoever sent the message is who they claim to be. Spammers could still exist, of course, but it would be more expensive, because any key used for spamming would be rejected...
Re: Not having problems
Date: 2003-09-24 01:17 pm (UTC)As for rejecting PGP keys of spammers: go look at the list of things SoBig.F did to infected machines again. Now combine that list with the presence of PGP keys and the ability to record the keystrokes used to unlock the private key... that battle has already been lost, spammers can already acquire and use people's public and secret keys if they so wish, and I fully expect them to do so if it should become necessary --- the reputations of their victims are meaningless to them; we know that already as well. (Don't assume they have any limits to what they will do based on civility, morality, ethics, etc. Even Canter and Siegel are still out there, hopping ISP accounts --- and hopping states as they get disbarred in each.)
Re: Not having problems
Date: 2003-09-24 02:49 pm (UTC)Re: Not having problems
Date: 2003-09-24 10:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-09-24 11:14 am (UTC)Yes, it does feel like that sometimes. Gone are the days when I can put something like "hey, long time no see" in a subject line...