"No, I'm not sheldonb...I meant to hit "no karma" on my last post and hit "post anon" instead. He is a foe of mine as well. He doesn't post, no friends, just collects foes. Anyone he hates must be ok in my book:)"
Ha! I noticed he never posted heh. Makes you wonder what that guy's up to.:)
"That obviously doesn't apply to double opt-in lists that I'm actively wanting to receive, but how about the email I send you telling you your webserver is not secure? "
You're talking about the difference between a private email address and the address of somebody doing business on the web. You don't expect an automated message when you email your friend saying "your message has been recieved, expect a response in 48 hours..." do you? I'm trying to solve private e-mail problems here, not corporate. If 'global' situations existed, then everybody'd have auto-responders like that to let people know the message wasn't typo'd or something.
The point I'm making is that a webmaster (or anybody who wants to be contacted from their website) has a seperate responsibility to make it easy for you to reach him/her. Though it's a good example of a situation where that might break, it's also an example of an unlikely scenario. Frankly, I'm not trying to solve his problems. But you know what? I'll take a stab at it.
Webmasters get spam all the time. There are bots that go through every domain listed and send an unsolicited offer to webmaster@domain. So how woulud this be useful to a webmaster who also has to watch out for people with legitimate complaints? If he uses a filter, he risks losing an important message. If he uses no filtering at all, he/she risks deleting the wrong mail, or even losing important messages in a sea of junk. (I've had that happen) You're right that it isn't reasonable to expect somebody notifying him of a site problem to jump through too many hoops. In that case, though, all you really need to know is that there is a human on the other end. If you send a mail to webmaster@whereever.com and you instantly get a message back saying "There are 5 images below. Click on the red flower and your previous message will go through." They click on a URL, if they click the right one then the server knows what to do. The user doesn't even need to send a message. If they click the wrong one, nothing happens. No biggie. As long as it's explained to the user why that's in place, it's not a big deal. If that's unreasonable to the person emailing the webmaster, then I don't know what to suggest. I can't please everybody, nor would I attempt to try. It would be up to the webmaster to say "Well, I got too many people sending me messages but not following through, I shouldn't use this scheme anymore." I wouldn't blame him for it.
"There are many occasions where the message is more important to the recipient than the sender, and TMDA type systems often fail in those situations."
Valid point. I won't argue that. Me personally, I don't care. If somebody has an important message to me, but can't get it to me because of a step I put in the way. Tough nuts. I'm in the same boat without it. I risk losing their message to a filter, I risk losing their message to a full inbox, I risk never getting the message because of a broken connection somewhere. Few people treat e-mail like it's reliable. If this system causes somebody else not to recieve an important message, then it's up to them to not use it. No biggie. I'm not going to put a gun to their head.
"... it will interfere with your communications and it will cost you more in time and complexity."
You mean like spam is? Would so many people get their panties in a bunch over SPAM if it didn't create unwanted complexity or time in their lives? All it takes is a little understanding. "Im sorry, but the steps I'm forced to take to fight spam are causing me to lose messages. In order to guarantee your message goes through, then take this one time step."
"TMDA is great for lists and similar niches, but I don't think it's a solution for all email communications."
I disagree. Instant Messaging is extremely popular today, and the ideas I'm expressing here are borrowed directly from how it works. I'll concede that there are challenges. None of them are unsolvable, whether they be fixed through innovative UI or by training society.
"This costs money. Thus making it less attractive to spam."
This costs money, thus making their tactics more aggressive. They're not going to just give up. they're going to protect their growth.
"Either way makes it a less appealing business to be in, and raises the barrier of entry so that less "creative" spammers will go out of business... "
Nope. What will happen is that everybody will have to use such a strict guideline to sending mesages that nobody will want to use e-mail, or people will learn to live with spam.
"Think about it, would you? Would you stop using email in favor of a closed system that you can't recieve spam on, but no one uses?"
I've already ditched e-mail. I use Instant Messaging to talk to people I want to talk to because I'm sick of SPAM. Everybody else is quite happy with IM too.
"I disagree. Spammers can't win the filter war because they can't get away from one thing : they must -no matter how well they disguise their headers, subject or even body text- mention a product and offer a link or phone number. Thus, their mail can be filtered."
Heh, and you think that's not going to filter everybody else in the world?
"To me, it seems to be a fight the spammers cannot win."
Wrong. The Spammers will win. People won't give up the ability to get messages from their loved ones, even if it means having to put up with SPAM.
"For now, the best solution is do implement filters on your servers and provide users with white-list capability. Works great for me : only about 0.3% of spams get into my inbox."
What I've been talking about all along is a white list, only mine mentions a method where somebody new can request to get on it. You don't even need filters with that in place. Spammers will not be able to get through. If, by some miracle they do, you can punt them and never hear from them again.
Filters are not the solution. Period. You cannot make a good enough filter to block all spam. You cannot make an effective filter that doesn't generate false positives. IM, on the other hand, uses the white list and permission request setup that I described, and it's been working for years. I've had the same ICQ number since 97, and I get 0 spam.
"If the sales dip, they will be less likely to put money into spam advertising. If they don't pay the spammers to advertise their products, that is less spam."
Uh, no. When they see a dip in sales, they'll start looking into how spam filters work and how to get around them. And since email is such an open system, it won't be hard to do. SPAMvertisers are very creative.
"Why would you want to do this? It's not like they are going to take you off their list, anyway."
Because they won't even be able to get their foot in the door. It's no longer a matter of tricking filters anymore.
"See, I don't think that's very realistic in the near-to-mid term. Even in 95% of the countries pass laws saying that it's illegal, spammers can broadcast from that 5%..."
I really wasn't referring to legality here. I don't think the law will do anything to stop spammers. (If it could, the DMCA would have forced P2P off the air) It means that they have to maintain a system that can recieve messages back so they can work their way into somebody's mailbox. Suddenly, it becomes a lot more time consuming and expensive to maintain a marketing operation like that. Set up properly, it'll take human intervention for every single message sent through. Force the system to do work that way, and bye bye spam.
All filtering will do is make them smarter. The end result will be nobody using e-mail at all.
"if they charge you for cd's can you legally copy copyrighted stuff to them?"
Ugh is that shitty. Either they charge people that are completely 100% uninvolved, or they double-charge the legitimate customer, all in the hopes of charging the few that haven't paid.
I was talking with a friend of mine today about a slashdot article a few days ago involving charging ISPs for P2P. He has no interest in MP3s or P2P today. He will develop an interest in it once he starts having to pay for it.
The real problem here is that the content industries aren't satisfying customer demand. They should be the ones selling MP3s. It baffles me that they're not. Obviously there's a lot of interest there, and instead they're treating everybody like they belong in jail.
Frankly, I'm against any reparations to companies like this until they start treating us like customers again and start innovating in the area of music and music delivery.
"Aside from the sheer annoyance value to users (on both ends) of such a system, how is it going to cope with automated (and wanted) email where the sender is a program, not a person?"
First, I would counter that it's not an annoyance that people haven't gone through before. ICQ has it, reputable registration places have it, etc. Headache or not, at least you have a sure-fire way of blocking somebody who's being onoxious. As for automated email, you bring up a good point.
What I do in that case is I make an alias that the automated mail can get sent to. 'Slashdot@mydomain.com'. Anything that's sent to that address gets through, and obviously I'm not going to be using that email elsewhere. If Slashdot were to sell my name somewhere, then all I'd need to do is shut down that alias.
Is that useful for Hotmail? Initially, no. They could implement sub-domain use, though. So I could have the address Anonvmous_Coward.Slashdot@hotmail.com, for example. Plus, Hotmail could give me a nice interface for that and all would be good.
That's what I do today. It may not be the perfect answer, but basically what I'm doing is I'm assigning a single address intended for a single user that can be turned off on a whim. It wouldn't be necessary to get an email from them for it to work. I have my own domain so I've been able to play with all this. It's amazing how little spam gets to me now.
" We need a solution that makes it financially untenable to operate a spam business in the first place."
That's why I suggested what I did. It needs to be set up so that somebody can't send me anything until they are authorized. It'd require a human being on the other end working to get my attention personally. If it requires a human for each message sent, then suddenly it gets rather expensive to market that way.
"And remeber - if tools (like SpamAssassin and whatever else) start to get so good that spammers have to spend a large amount of time crafting spam to try and get past them, it ceases to become profitable for them, thus they will have to raise their rates, thus the service seems less appealing to those buying it, thus the amount of spam will decrease."
I don't think that'll work very effectively. First off, they don't know that the email's being deleted and not read, secondly there'll always be somebody who gets it. Email, as it is today, is too OPEN. SpamAssasin helps close that door a bit, but it doesn't send them a message back saying "Sorry, rejected."
What they need is to be forced to have an address that can be responded to.
" If you use their From-address, your filter will be fooled by spammers that raid address books (standard virus technique) to create their own from-addresses."
That's a good question, but not hard to fix. It wouldn't be hard for the user to change the way their name is displayed, and pick up on that. They could use a signature with a key-word that your filters pick up, etc.
There's lots of ways of doing it that don't involve having the other guy change his email address. Though you bring up a good point, I've never recieved an email like that.
"The reasons to boycott the recording industry [dontbuycds.org] become more numerous every day."
Boycotting will not work in our favor. Let me say this again: boycotting won't work. "We've seen a decline in sales, it must be because of P2P". And they'd be sort of right.
Here's an alternative suggestion. Pick a day. Everybody buy a CD within a week of that day, then on the designated day return the CD. Trust me, they'll notice that.
"If and only if this behavior was not limited to a single day, then it is obvious this guy was pirating music. He took music without paying for it, plain and simple.
Of course, if he owned the CDs, that is a different story, but the probability of the guy (it has to be a guy!) owning those CDs just isn't there. "
Um no, it is not 'plain and simple' as you are suggesting. Chances are he downloaded 600 songs because he was looking for new music to get into. Since we don't know if he downloaded whole albums or a bunch of singles, we cannot play judge/jury.
Frankly, I think he was downloading the songs he already has CDs for. 600 songs is what, 60 CDs? That's a lot of music you don't have to find and download in one day. He probably went through each CD on his collection and started downloading the songs from them so he didn't have to sift through his collection every time he wanted to hear a specific song.
I can imagine doing that, especially before a move.
I don't think your solution would solve the problem. There are far too many people sending it to enforce, and there are boundary problems too. If they email me from North Korea, then what?
The cause of SPAM is an email system that's far too open. "Hey look, I can get my message to everybody." Tighten that up, and suddenly e-mail's not such a big vulnerability anymore.
"Plus how exactly do you find a game out of a list of 32 000??? I have a hard enough time picking out a game after reading a few reviews and staring at the Walmart showcase for an hour...and they only have a few hundred!!"
That number's dumb. What makes it dumber is that they claim the system's more powerful than any on the market, thus implying it's a 3D system etc. If you take every game made for any system since the 3DO, you don't arrive at 32,000.
"This is doomed to failure. Without any of the big name gaming companies to back them up, noone will buy the console.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next 3do"
Whoah, easy on the 3DO there. It did pretty damn well for a no-name company that sold a $700 machine. You shoulda said Jaguar!
In any event, everybody and their mother thinks they know how to make a good game console, but until they get big name developers on board they can forget it. Remember when nirvana was getting a game console that could do what an arcade unit does? People want the premium gaming experience, not hacked together games that barely convey the ideas they're after.
This system ain't going to do well as long as Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are getting the 'wow' games.
It will be when people figure out how to get their message through Spam Assassin. It isn't that hard. The first thing they have to do is stop putting garbage numbers in the subject, then get rid of the excessive spaces, then stop using HTML. Do all that, and you've already cleaned up the major points that Spam Assassin trips on.
"I'd be unwilling to pay for a service that would accost me with dozens of permission slips daily."
I doubt that'd happen. There'd have to be a human on the other end trying to get your message through. That person's not sending SPAM to lots of people if he has to fill out a form of some sort every single time to get a message through.
He/she wouldn't be able to automate it either if they set it up properly. If everybody picked their own 'key word' and rotated them once in a while, and then wrote their own little description of how to arrive at that keyword, then they'd have to figure out everybody's registration manually.
"This picture has three flowers in it, what color is the flower in the middle?"
Until they get that question right, you're not getting a 'permission slip'. Chances are, they won't even try to fill out the form because they'd have to do it for everybody.
"Does anyone think AOL or Hotmail could start using such a system as the one outlined in the article?"
No. My problem's with the senders, not the messages. What Hotmail should do is send back an email saying "Your message has been rejected because you have not been authorized by this user. If you'd like to request authorization, click here and follow the instructions."
When they properly fill out the form, you get a message saying "so'n'so wants to send you a message. Interested?" and you can say yes/no. If you say yes, they get added to your address book and they can email you until you remove them from it.
With this approach, it requires a valid return address before the message can possibly get to you. That means you're able to tell the person to remove you, unlike today's 'send anything to anybody' system.
If Hotmail did that, I'd actually consider paying for their service.
Slashdot Mirror
"No, I'm not sheldonb...I meant to hit "no karma" on my last post and hit "post anon" instead. He is a foe of mine as well. He doesn't post, no friends, just collects foes. Anyone he hates must be ok in my book :)"
:)
Ha! I noticed he never posted heh. Makes you wonder what that guy's up to.
Cheers man.
"The biggest security problem with running apache on Windows is Windows. Anyone who uses windows for a server deserves what happens to their server."
Everybody who generalizes sucks.
"I've been noticing that Apache doesn't make news anymore--at least on Slashdot..."
That's because it hasn't had a minute version change!
So... your way will work if millions upon millions of Americans (who aren't up to speed on the issue) plus 3 million kazaa members participate?
My way will work with only a few thousand people.
"Why so many fans? You're generally either funny or have something interesting to say, and the freak sheldonb hates you as well."
/. celebrity of some sort. I checked, though, he does have me on his foes list. Ha!
Thanks man, though I'm stunned you got a +1 instead of an off-topic for that, heh.
Question: Who's Sheldonb? Assume that's either you or a
*posted with no bonus because I'm off-topic.*
"That obviously doesn't apply to double opt-in lists that I'm actively wanting to receive, but how about the email I send you telling you your webserver is not secure? "
You're talking about the difference between a private email address and the address of somebody doing business on the web. You don't expect an automated message when you email your friend saying "your message has been recieved, expect a response in 48 hours..." do you? I'm trying to solve private e-mail problems here, not corporate. If 'global' situations existed, then everybody'd have auto-responders like that to let people know the message wasn't typo'd or something.
The point I'm making is that a webmaster (or anybody who wants to be contacted from their website) has a seperate responsibility to make it easy for you to reach him/her. Though it's a good example of a situation where that might break, it's also an example of an unlikely scenario. Frankly, I'm not trying to solve his problems. But you know what? I'll take a stab at it.
Webmasters get spam all the time. There are bots that go through every domain listed and send an unsolicited offer to webmaster@domain. So how woulud this be useful to a webmaster who also has to watch out for people with legitimate complaints? If he uses a filter, he risks losing an important message. If he uses no filtering at all, he/she risks deleting the wrong mail, or even losing important messages in a sea of junk. (I've had that happen) You're right that it isn't reasonable to expect somebody notifying him of a site problem to jump through too many hoops. In that case, though, all you really need to know is that there is a human on the other end. If you send a mail to webmaster@whereever.com and you instantly get a message back saying "There are 5 images below. Click on the red flower and your previous message will go through." They click on a URL, if they click the right one then the server knows what to do. The user doesn't even need to send a message. If they click the wrong one, nothing happens. No biggie. As long as it's explained to the user why that's in place, it's not a big deal. If that's unreasonable to the person emailing the webmaster, then I don't know what to suggest. I can't please everybody, nor would I attempt to try. It would be up to the webmaster to say "Well, I got too many people sending me messages but not following through, I shouldn't use this scheme anymore." I wouldn't blame him for it.
"There are many occasions where the message is more important to the recipient than the sender, and TMDA type systems often fail in those situations."
Valid point. I won't argue that. Me personally, I don't care. If somebody has an important message to me, but can't get it to me because of a step I put in the way. Tough nuts. I'm in the same boat without it. I risk losing their message to a filter, I risk losing their message to a full inbox, I risk never getting the message because of a broken connection somewhere. Few people treat e-mail like it's reliable. If this system causes somebody else not to recieve an important message, then it's up to them to not use it. No biggie. I'm not going to put a gun to their head.
"... it will interfere with your communications and it will cost you more in time and complexity."
You mean like spam is? Would so many people get their panties in a bunch over SPAM if it didn't create unwanted complexity or time in their lives? All it takes is a little understanding. "Im sorry, but the steps I'm forced to take to fight spam are causing me to lose messages. In order to guarantee your message goes through, then take this one time step."
"TMDA is great for lists and similar niches, but I don't think it's a solution for all email communications."
I disagree. Instant Messaging is extremely popular today, and the ideas I'm expressing here are borrowed directly from how it works. I'll concede that there are challenges. None of them are unsolvable, whether they be fixed through innovative UI or by training society.
Ha! Just kidding. Put the torches out, please.
"This costs money. Thus making it less attractive to spam."
This costs money, thus making their tactics more aggressive. They're not going to just give up. they're going to protect their growth.
"Either way makes it a less appealing business to be in, and raises the barrier of entry so that less "creative" spammers will go out of business... "
Nope. What will happen is that everybody will have to use such a strict guideline to sending mesages that nobody will want to use e-mail, or people will learn to live with spam.
"Think about it, would you? Would you stop using email in favor of a closed system that you can't recieve spam on, but no one uses?"
I've already ditched e-mail. I use Instant Messaging to talk to people I want to talk to because I'm sick of SPAM. Everybody else is quite happy with IM too.
"I disagree. Spammers can't win the filter war because they can't get away from one thing : they must -no matter how well they disguise their headers, subject or even body text- mention a product and offer a link or phone number. Thus, their mail can be filtered."
Heh, and you think that's not going to filter everybody else in the world?
"To me, it seems to be a fight the spammers cannot win."
Wrong. The Spammers will win. People won't give up the ability to get messages from their loved ones, even if it means having to put up with SPAM.
"For now, the best solution is do implement filters on your servers and provide users with white-list capability. Works great for me : only about 0.3% of spams get into my inbox."
What I've been talking about all along is a white list, only mine mentions a method where somebody new can request to get on it. You don't even need filters with that in place. Spammers will not be able to get through. If, by some miracle they do, you can punt them and never hear from them again.
Filters are not the solution. Period. You cannot make a good enough filter to block all spam. You cannot make an effective filter that doesn't generate false positives. IM, on the other hand, uses the white list and permission request setup that I described, and it's been working for years. I've had the same ICQ number since 97, and I get 0 spam.
"Like criminals won't figure a way to block the signal?"
They will, but the sparks will be quite pretty.
I'd be all for this if it were Firestone. That way, when my tire goes, they'll be able to identify my body.
"If the sales dip, they will be less likely to put money into spam advertising. If they don't pay the spammers to advertise their products, that is less spam."
Uh, no. When they see a dip in sales, they'll start looking into how spam filters work and how to get around them. And since email is such an open system, it won't be hard to do. SPAMvertisers are very creative.
"Why would you want to do this? It's not like they are going to take you off their list, anyway."
Because they won't even be able to get their foot in the door. It's no longer a matter of tricking filters anymore.
"See, I don't think that's very realistic in the near-to-mid term. Even in 95% of the countries pass laws saying that it's illegal, spammers can broadcast from that 5%..."
I really wasn't referring to legality here. I don't think the law will do anything to stop spammers. (If it could, the DMCA would have forced P2P off the air) It means that they have to maintain a system that can recieve messages back so they can work their way into somebody's mailbox. Suddenly, it becomes a lot more time consuming and expensive to maintain a marketing operation like that. Set up properly, it'll take human intervention for every single message sent through. Force the system to do work that way, and bye bye spam.
All filtering will do is make them smarter. The end result will be nobody using e-mail at all.
"if they charge you for cd's can you legally copy copyrighted stuff to them?"
Ugh is that shitty. Either they charge people that are completely 100% uninvolved, or they double-charge the legitimate customer, all in the hopes of charging the few that haven't paid.
I was talking with a friend of mine today about a slashdot article a few days ago involving charging ISPs for P2P. He has no interest in MP3s or P2P today. He will develop an interest in it once he starts having to pay for it.
The real problem here is that the content industries aren't satisfying customer demand. They should be the ones selling MP3s. It baffles me that they're not. Obviously there's a lot of interest there, and instead they're treating everybody like they belong in jail.
Frankly, I'm against any reparations to companies like this until they start treating us like customers again and start innovating in the area of music and music delivery.
"Aside from the sheer annoyance value to users (on both ends) of such a system, how is it going to cope with automated (and wanted) email where the sender is a program, not a person?"
First, I would counter that it's not an annoyance that people haven't gone through before. ICQ has it, reputable registration places have it, etc. Headache or not, at least you have a sure-fire way of blocking somebody who's being onoxious. As for automated email, you bring up a good point.
What I do in that case is I make an alias that the automated mail can get sent to. 'Slashdot@mydomain.com'. Anything that's sent to that address gets through, and obviously I'm not going to be using that email elsewhere. If Slashdot were to sell my name somewhere, then all I'd need to do is shut down that alias.
Is that useful for Hotmail? Initially, no. They could implement sub-domain use, though. So I could have the address Anonvmous_Coward.Slashdot@hotmail.com, for example. Plus, Hotmail could give me a nice interface for that and all would be good.
That's what I do today. It may not be the perfect answer, but basically what I'm doing is I'm assigning a single address intended for a single user that can be turned off on a whim. It wouldn't be necessary to get an email from them for it to work. I have my own domain so I've been able to play with all this. It's amazing how little spam gets to me now.
" We need a solution that makes it financially untenable to operate a spam business in the first place."
That's why I suggested what I did. It needs to be set up so that somebody can't send me anything until they are authorized. It'd require a human being on the other end working to get my attention personally. If it requires a human for each message sent, then suddenly it gets rather expensive to market that way.
"And remeber - if tools (like SpamAssassin and whatever else) start to get so good that spammers have to spend a large amount of time crafting spam to try and get past them, it ceases to become profitable for them, thus they will have to raise their rates, thus the service seems less appealing to those buying it, thus the amount of spam will decrease."
I don't think that'll work very effectively. First off, they don't know that the email's being deleted and not read, secondly there'll always be somebody who gets it. Email, as it is today, is too OPEN. SpamAssasin helps close that door a bit, but it doesn't send them a message back saying "Sorry, rejected."
What they need is to be forced to have an address that can be responded to.
" If you use their From-address, your filter will be fooled by spammers that raid address books (standard virus technique) to create their own from-addresses."
That's a good question, but not hard to fix. It wouldn't be hard for the user to change the way their name is displayed, and pick up on that. They could use a signature with a key-word that your filters pick up, etc.
There's lots of ways of doing it that don't involve having the other guy change his email address. Though you bring up a good point, I've never recieved an email like that.
"The RIAA, Satan, what's the difference?"
Satan can sing.
"The reasons to boycott the recording industry [dontbuycds.org] become more numerous every day."
Boycotting will not work in our favor. Let me say this again: boycotting won't work. "We've seen a decline in sales, it must be because of P2P". And they'd be sort of right.
Here's an alternative suggestion. Pick a day. Everybody buy a CD within a week of that day, then on the designated day return the CD. Trust me, they'll notice that.
"00 songs a day is a bit excessive. I can't hardly think of five songs a day I want to download."
If your 100-disc changer broke, you'd have 600+ songs you'd want an MP3 version of.
"If and only if this behavior was not limited to a single day, then it is obvious this guy was pirating music. He took music without paying for it, plain and simple.
Of course, if he owned the CDs, that is a different story, but the probability of the guy (it has to be a guy!) owning those CDs just isn't there.
"
Um no, it is not 'plain and simple' as you are suggesting. Chances are he downloaded 600 songs because he was looking for new music to get into.
Since we don't know if he downloaded whole albums or a bunch of singles, we cannot play judge/jury.
Frankly, I think he was downloading the songs he already has CDs for. 600 songs is what, 60 CDs? That's a lot of music you don't have to find and download in one day. He probably went through each CD on his collection and started downloading the songs from them so he didn't have to sift through his collection every time he wanted to hear a specific song.
I can imagine doing that, especially before a move.
"Fraud is the cause of spam. "
I don't think your solution would solve the problem. There are far too many people sending it to enforce, and there are boundary problems too. If they email me from North Korea, then what?
The cause of SPAM is an email system that's far too open. "Hey look, I can get my message to everybody." Tighten that up, and suddenly e-mail's not such a big vulnerability anymore.
"Plus how exactly do you find a game out of a list of 32 000??? I have a hard enough time picking out a game after reading a few reviews and staring at the Walmart showcase for an hour...and they only have a few hundred!!"
That number's dumb. What makes it dumber is that they claim the system's more powerful than any on the market, thus implying it's a 3D system etc. If you take every game made for any system since the 3DO, you don't arrive at 32,000.
"This is doomed to failure. Without any of the big name gaming companies to back them up, noone will buy the console.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next 3do"
Whoah, easy on the 3DO there. It did pretty damn well for a no-name company that sold a $700 machine. You shoulda said Jaguar!
In any event, everybody and their mother thinks they know how to make a good game console, but until they get big name developers on board they can forget it. Remember when nirvana was getting a game console that could do what an arcade unit does? People want the premium gaming experience, not hacked together games that barely convey the ideas they're after.
This system ain't going to do well as long as Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are getting the 'wow' games.
"Is it really worth all that trouble?"
It will be when people figure out how to get their message through Spam Assassin. It isn't that hard. The first thing they have to do is stop putting garbage numbers in the subject, then get rid of the excessive spaces, then stop using HTML. Do all that, and you've already cleaned up the major points that Spam Assassin trips on.
"I'd be unwilling to pay for a service that would accost me with dozens of permission slips daily."
I doubt that'd happen. There'd have to be a human on the other end trying to get your message through. That person's not sending SPAM to lots of people if he has to fill out a form of some sort every single time to get a message through.
He/she wouldn't be able to automate it either if they set it up properly. If everybody picked their own 'key word' and rotated them once in a while, and then wrote their own little description of how to arrive at that keyword, then they'd have to figure out everybody's registration manually.
"This picture has three flowers in it, what color is the flower in the middle?"
Until they get that question right, you're not getting a 'permission slip'. Chances are, they won't even try to fill out the form because they'd have to do it for everybody.
"Does anyone think AOL or Hotmail could start using such a system as the one outlined in the article?"
No. My problem's with the senders, not the messages. What Hotmail should do is send back an email saying "Your message has been rejected because you have not been authorized by this user. If you'd like to request authorization, click here and follow the instructions."
When they properly fill out the form, you get a message saying "so'n'so wants to send you a message. Interested?" and you can say yes/no. If you say yes, they get added to your address book and they can email you until you remove them from it.
With this approach, it requires a valid return address before the message can possibly get to you. That means you're able to tell the person to remove you, unlike today's 'send anything to anybody' system.
If Hotmail did that, I'd actually consider paying for their service.