Jargons of Info Tech industry

[Brendan Guild]

Roedy Green wrote in news:lnvqk192k5k3avi3hvgvuqgp8846ksd7q4 at 4ax.com:

> On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 11:45:03 -0400, Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote
> or quoted :
> 
>>Jeff Poskanzer, now *he* has a spam problem. He gets a few million
>>spams a day: <URL: http://www.acme.com/mail_filtering/ >.
> 
> It is a bit like termites. If we don't do something drastic to deal
> with spam, the ruddy things will eventually make the entire Internet
> unusable.
> 
> the three keys to me are:
> 
> 1. flipping to a digital id based email system so that the sender of
> any piece of mail can be legally identified and prosecuted.
> If every piece of anonymous email disappeared that would go a long
> way to clearing up spam.  Let those sending ransom notes, death
> threats and  hate mail use snail mail.  As a second best,
> correspondents are identified by permission/identity/encryption keys
> given to them by their recipients.

The first part seems rather expensive and I'm not sure it would help. 
Is spam illegal? I don't see how it can be. I mean, those messages are 
annoying, but not that annoying. I get unsolicited email that I 
actually want often enough to want to avoid gumming it up in legal 
issues.

The second part seems like it would be annoying for the recipients and 
would make just sending ordinary email more complicated.

> 2. flipping to a sender pays system so that the Internet does not
> subsidise spam.

This is very promising. Our ISPs should put limits on how much email we 
can send. The limits should be rather insane, nothing that any 
nonspammer would ever come close to, but low enough to stop spam dead. 
If we want to send more than that, we'd better be charged extra.

We could make each mail server responsible for the spam that it sends 
out. It seems that currently mail servers are swamped and spending big 
money on handling the vast loads of spam that gets pumped into them 
from other mail servers, so I'm sure they wouldn't mind having a rule 
like: Refuse to allow email to be transported from any server that 
spews more than 50% spam. Servers could be audited occasionally to 
check if they are spammers.

I don't know exactly how spammers send spam, but a rule like that would 
sure stop ISPs from allowing any one person to send a thousand emails a 
day.

In fact, if 99% of the email sent is spam, then we can safely assume 
that the proper email traffic is 1/100th of what it is now. We just 
have to close the valves a little. Mail servers could have an upper 
limit on how much they will transfer each day to force restrictions 
throughout the system and finally to the individual emailer. I'd rather 
have my mail server give me an error message saying that I've sent too 
much email every once in a while than have the entire Internet clogged 
with spam.

[snipped third key]