Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence

Alessandro Vesely <vesely@tana.it> Wed, 17 June 2009 09:18 UTC

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Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:18:08 +0200
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Subject: Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence
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der Mouse wrote:
> 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.

You were pioneers, and obviously expected that whatever steps were 
needed to amend reliability would have been taken.

In exchange for what are we giving up reliability now?

>>> (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.)

Just a guess based on http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct07/email.html and 
averaging on your correspondents...

>> 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.

The point of responsibility deserves more insight. I mention it in the 
I-D, but only generically. What I'd mean is that you should be able to 
reach the author of a message that has been delivered to you; or, to 
allow anonymous posting, you should be able to reach the author's 
postmaster, list moderator, or similar type, who is able to reach the 
author, possibly indirectly, and that might disclose that information 
according to existing agreements, local laws, the site's policies, et 
cetera. Of course, an author's reputation may be affected that way. A 
site reputation should then result from the average reputation of the 
authors using that site, and a site may have a policy that allows them 
to push out unwanted authors. I'm not aware of liability implications, 
though.