Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence

[der Mouse <[e-mail]>]

>> Can you spell it out for me how you get from Bill's lack of
>> conviction - okay, let's make it easy and assume Bill is right: from
>> the lack of widespread adoption or attention to new technical
>> antispam techniques - to email dying out? 
> Because it is not reliable.  Why would you spend your time and
> intelligence writing text that will end up in some spam folder
> without ever being read?

_Will_ end up there?  Without _ever_ being read?  I wouldn't, of
course.  But that's not what we have.  I participate in a lot of
mailing lists, and I daresay some fraction of what I write gets ignored
by some fraction of its potential readers - some of it because of
misfiling by spamfilters, some of it because people have decided I'm
not worth listening to, whatever.  But as long as those fractions stay
small enough, the readership is high enough that I don't consider the
time and effort wasted.

Mail does not need perfect - or even very good - reliability in order
to be useful.  When I first started using email, it could take a week
to get mail from Montreal to California, with a chance that sometimes
approached even that it would get lost on the way.  This didn't deter
lots of people, including me, from using it anyway.

>>> Newcomers don't perceive [email] as something new and exciting, but
>>> rather as an obsolete communication system [...]
>> Honestly, this is one of the few things that could save email.  If
>> enough of the net.population deserts it for newer and shinier
>> communications media, spammers will perceive a lack of value in it
>> and start leaving it alone, making it usable again for us [...]
> That's an interesting assertion.  I think spammers love their
> honeypots, some of which possibly even pay a visit to their
> spamvertized sites.  How will spammers perceive a lack of value?

Low ROI.  A honeypot can "visit" a malware drive-by installer all day,
and if it doesn't result in another bot joining the botnet, it holds no
value for the bot herder.

Of course, not all spam is about recruiting botnets members, but
similar remarks apply to all forms of spam: if it doesn't produce the
desired effect, it will stop being used, whether that effect is people
falling for phishing scams, people falling for 419 scams, new botnet
hosts, customers for knockoff software copies, customers for "cheap
meds", whatever.

> Their instigators are not looking for the most effective channel,
> they are looking for the cheapest.

The cheapest - in terms of effect for resources invested.  ROI.  A
spammers-only email system will provide zero-to-negative ROI.

> They might very well be the last ones to leave, who knows.

Could be.  I did say "could save email", not "would save email". :)

> At any rate, I'd very much avoid such experiment: It is the worst
> anti-spam approach I've ever heard.

Oh, I'm not proposing it as "let's do this in order to save email".  If
it happens at all, it will happen because most of the net sees email as
not worth saving.  (I find amusing irony in the idea that that it might
prove to be be email being seen as not worth saving that saves it.)

>> (FVO "us" approximating "people who didn't desert it", which I
>> expect would include most/all of the people I for one care about
>> exchanging email with anyway).
> You must be at least 47, then.  Correct? ;-)

No, actually, I'm not.  (Where did you get that figure?  I'm curious.)

>> Do I expect that to happen?  Not really.  But neither do I see
>> [email] dying out.
> Do you perceive migration toward giant ESPs as the premise for
> newer/shinier media?

Not premise for, exactly, but I see it as related, in that it's part of
the current flood towards shiny interfaces and never mind whether the
content has any value; it's new! and shiny! so it must be good.

> The global walled-garden is just a step away.

Perhaps.  I see no sign of it, though, at least not as I sketched it;
the few entities that are coming close to being global walled gardens
for email (gmail being the first one that comes to my mind) are not, as
far as I can tell, bothering to impose the responsibility on senders
that was a premise for the walled gardens I described being any more
spam-free than today's net.

> Nowadays businesses are too much concerned about costs, but what will
> happen when they will be wanting to pay a small amount for acceptable
> reliability?

I don't know.  I don't even have guesses; it depends on too many other
factors which you haven't specified (many of which, I suspect, nobody
currently has more than guesses for either).

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