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SendMail CTO Sounds Off On Spam and FTC
CowboyRobot writes "Eric Allman takes his well-deserved turn in commenting on the state of spam, the dark future, and the need for intervention.
He calls spam an "arms race" where "in the long run everyone loses (except the arms dealers)."
As you might imagine, he's on our side, and he does a good job of clearly describing the current state of spam, and the possible solutions."
>The seventh is opt-out with an unsubscribe link that actually confirms your address as belonging to a live account.
The author doesn't say whether he believes this happens, but he implies so by adding another similar case: "The unsubscribe link removes you from the list in question, but it also adds your address to another list."
I'm calling bullshit on both of them. I challenge anyone here to cite any quantative evidence that replying to spam has resulted in them receiving so much as one extra message.
No, anecdotes don't cut it. Neither does common sense, or "Well, it stands to reason" arguments. Neither does the availability of "verified" address lists. I can create a billion psuedo-random addresses, call them "verified" and slap whatever price tag I like on them. It doesn't make it so, and remember what sort of people we're dealing with here. You don't think they'd screw each other over for a few bucks?
As far as I'm concerned, spam is so untargetted that replying to an unsubscribe cannot possibly make it worse. It's vanishingly unlikely to make it better, but how, exactly, does it make it worse?
Examples, statistics please. No more anecdotes, no more gut feelings.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"Are they even relevant except for inertia?"
You could say the same about anything the W3c outputs, but yes, sendmail is a standard. Like ASCII it may not be the best standard, but it's a standard. You can use anything you wish, which is the beauty of the whole enchilada, but unless you have a seriously large number of machines to administer, you mind want to consider scaling a change to another MTA from ol' sendmail.
"Sendmail, promiscuous relay for all"
Exchange is as bad if you don't set up authentication. Hell, any SMTP server is as bad if you don't set up *some* form of authentication, but I guess that mentioning that would have stopped your anti-sendmail troll.
"indecipherable rules file"
Assuming everyone else is as incompetent as yourself is a dangerous trap to fall into.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.