From: flint@gistdev.gist.com (Flint Pellett)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: Question about unsolicited Internet Email.
Keywords: question legal use email
Date: 13 Oct 92 15:00:03 GMT
Followup-To: comp.mail.misc
Organization: Global Information Systems Technology Inc., Savoy, IL

kdenning@portal.hq.videocart.com (Karl Denninger) writes:

>So be it with the networks, IMHO.  If your network doesn't want some form of
>traffic, figure out a way to filter it out and either bounce it back to the
>sender or ditch it entirely.  I will note that it is almost certainly NOT in
>your best interest to do this -- if you fragment yourself from others you
>provide a poorer service to those who connect to and with you, and
>eventually if that situation persists your customers will either find
>another provider (if they can) or will be at an extreme competitive
>disadvantage.  Such is the realm of reality.

The choice shouldn't have to be between totally open and being totally
closed off.  The only reason that is the case today is because our
software isn't up to it yet, and any filtering that can be done can
only be done a lot farther downstream than where we need it to be
done.  My company gets it's news and email via uucp from uunet.  If
everyone in the company were to add a particular subject to our kill
files, that would not save us from still paying to have those things
sent to us via uucp. 

For uucp sites, it would be a real benefit to us to be able to do more
filtering at the source site that is connected to the net backbone. 
For example, rather than just having all the news sent to us thru the
modem, uunet could instead only send us the From:/Subject: information
(the information on which we decide which articles to read).  We could
choose which articles we really want to read, and our newsreader would
send back a message requesting those articles only, for ones that
hadn't already been requested by someone else at our site.  The
advantage here would be a greatly reduced amount of stuff sent to us,
especially at small sites, and we could probably afford to subscribe
to more different newsgroups than we can now.  The disadvantage would
be that if I asked for an article I would not get to read it until
maybe an hour later when it came in.  I would also drastically reduce
the amount of disk space I would have to dedicate to holding the
news feed, and I'd also avoid the problem of missing an article because
it was already expired at my site.

Email could work the same way: If somebody I never heard of sent me
the man pages, all I would get would be a short notice saying who the
sender was, what the subject was, and the size of the message (which
would tip me off): I'd refuse it and uunet could dump it.  Of course,
I'd be sticking an hour delay into the process of getting my mail. 
There ought to be some way to avoid that and be able to let my
"friends and family" send to me without any delays: perhaps some type
of encrypted password that would allow the mail through without the
delay, and which I could change whenever I wanted.  (I don't have any
idea how to do this in a secure fashion- someone who is better versed
in that than me could probably come up with something.)  The thing is,
it wouldn't really need to be all that secure: I would have the
advantage of a permanent email address which anyone could send stuff
to me at, and the ability to make that address change whenever I
wanted to shut off large garbage transmissions. 

We certainly ought to be thinking about this type of thing: the net is
going to get bigger, and these problems are going to get a lot worse
unless we figure out better ways to control things. 
-- 
Flint Pellett, Global Information Systems Technology, Inc.
100 Trade Centre Drive, Suite 301, Champaign, IL  61820     (217) 352-1165
uunet!gistdev!flint or flint@gistdev.gist.com