deja vu

[cellio]

In the early days, email was unreliable and slow. We had to route messages by hand, and each machine in the network might process its UUCP queue only once or twice a day. It could take days for a message to get to its recipient, and sometimes it didn't get there at all.

Then, 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.

Comments

Re: Not having problems

[geekosaur]

There are folks here (i.e. at CMU) working on such schemes. Unfortunately, the consensus is that no such scheme would ever achieve critical mass.

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

[goljerp]

Sigh. You're probably right...