From: "John Rudd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
someone that Skip Brott didn't attribute wrote:
Why is it my responsibility as a holder of a valid email address to
accept
mail from anyone who wants to send me the mail? As the owner of the
email
address or, as the admin of the domain's mail server, I have no
obligation
to
accept your mail at all.
Obligations should be on the sender.
You are correct that you have no obligation to accept email from me (nor
anyone else for that matter), the issue of "obligations upon the sender"
depends on which obligations you're talking about, and which sender you're
talking about.
If I'm replying to a question you asked, then you are the _original_
sender, and no, it is not my obligation to jump through your C/R hoops in
order to get the answer to you. If you want the answer to your question,
it's YOUR obligation to make sure you can receive my answer.
If I didn't send the message at all, but this is backscatter, then it is
your obligation to prevent backscatter to innocent bystanders. It's not
my obligation to deal with your challenge messages, and it's entirely my
digression as to whether or not I'm going to report you to a blacklist for
producing backscatter. At that point, it becomes YOUR obligation to get
yourself off of a blacklist.
Further, I as the sender have no obligation to participate in your
anti-spam mechanism. It's YOUR mechanism. You feed it, you configure it,
your CPU cycles are spent on it. I have no obligation to participate in
the program you use for deciding "is this spam or not". I have no
obligation to devote my time and my CPU cycles to your anti-spam program.
It's rather rude for you to assume otherwise.
John, let's go to the snail mail analogy for email. In the light of
snail mail it is your responsibility to make a determination to read
or not to read any given piece of mail. It is your responsibility to
create a filter in your mailbox that tosses snail mail spam into a
trashbucket mounted thoughtfully just beneath your filtering mail box.
It still gets delivered. You delete it. You filter, mark, and sort it.
Or you simply read it.
The analogy breaks down a little when you can filter mail in the process
of delivery as the postal person places the mail into your mailbox. You
can let some of them through and mash the others back into the postal
person's hand, as it were. In the real world "this ain't gonna happen"
for snail mail. It can happen for real mail. Temporarily rejecting mail
and sending a "who are you" message back just does not fly with the post
office, with any efficiency. (They'd welcome the wasted postage if you
want to do it - up to the point the challenges swamped them or the first
challenge loop happened.)
Any way you look at it challenge/response is just plain evil and insulting.
There is no conceivable help for it.
{^_^}
