On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 05:55:01 -0400, Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote or quoted :
>Actually, you present a design that forces a solution that makes them >do what you want down their throats, never mind what they want, or >what they've been doing. It shows an amazing ignorance about the >internet and how people behave on it. Like most antispam proposals, it >won't actually stop spam, just force spammers to concentrate on >different channels. You seem to have randomly broken quoting for >people who download mail and read it offline, and for any medium >that's unreliable or doesn't reliably deliver messages "in order" - >which includes mail and news. Virus writers will love the ability to >change peoples address books remotely. The problem of differing >character sets is technically solved. Practically, the solution >doesn't work because people implementing the software ignore the >standards. What's your server going to do when it gets messages with >characters in them that aren't valid in the charset that it's declared >as being? Better yet, what's it going to do when the characters are >valid, but the declared charset isn't the one the author actually >used? You implementation sketch only covers the client talking to the >first server (in that it requires the client to encrypt a challange >phrase with the private key belonging the email id, which is >presumably what 2822 uses for the envelope sender). Most mail on the >internet goes through at least two servers, and news is much >worse. For instance, your messages apparently passed through 10 >servers getting to me. You really have to deal with store and forward, >or convince a large number of corporations that potentially hostile >users should be allowed to talk directly to their mail servers, which >isn't very likely. Kudos for recognizing that spam needs to be dealt >with by people with guns, but you lose half of them for making ISPS >liable for it. > >I also read the comment about wanting an automated "Ask them to run my >browser in my favorite configuration", which is equally naive. A lot >of sites have such cruft on them already. I find them funny - I surf >the web on three different platforms, none of them Windows. Any >pointer to download a new browser or plugin for Windows just impresses >me with the authors lack of skills. The only browser I know of that >runs on all three platforms is Opera, and it's something radically >different on one of the three. Even should you get the platform right, >almost nobody is going to bother upgrading following the download >links. The very small percentage of users who are real geeks will >silently thank you for the notice, and update their software. Most >users will ignore it so long as the page isn't obviously broken. For >those for whom it's broken, all but small percentage will simply find >some other site to visit. I'd suggest that anyone thinking about writing Your post brings up a meta-issue. How long should posts be? I note several schools of thought. There is the initial post, sort of a mini lecture on something covering perhaps 7 major points. Then you can have the theatre-critic style response where each person in turn goes through the 7 points saying when they think. Then they repeat the 7 points each commenting on what each of the others had to say on the seven points. etc. Then there is the conversational style where you discuss one major point at a time, perhaps with several threads, one for each point. These threads meander or split off themselves. My preference is to think of a post, other than perhaps the initial essay post, as like a paragraph. It should stick to one main idea. Seems to me google will have an easier time classifying posts if they don't cover too much ground. -- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. http://mindprod.com Again taking new Java programming contracts. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
