You want to define standards? Let's define some standard for establishing permission to mail. If we could solve the permission problem, then the filtering wouldn't be such a problem, because there wouldn't need to be as much (or maybe even any). As a user, I want a way to unambiguously allow a specific sender to send me things, "spam" filtering be damned. I also want a way to retract that permission, and have the mail flow from that sender (or any of their "affiliates") to stop.
Right now I've got a solution that allows me to do that, but it requires a significant paradigm change, away from single-e-mail-address.
In general, your "permission to send" idea is a good one to put in the requirements list for a standard email architecture. But your particular solution stinks because it simply adds another bandage to a creaky old email architecture that is long past its sell-by date.
Yes. I'm well aware of that. My requirements list included that my solution be able to actually /fix/ something with /today's/ architecture; this is a practical implementation to solve a real problem, which was that I was tired of vendor mail being confused for spam. So, yes, it stinks when compared to the concept of a shiny new mail architecture. However, it currently works and is successfully whitelisting the things I intended. I just received a message from a tool battery distributor that some batteries I ordered months ago are finally shipping. It was crappy HTML, and I would normally have completely missed it - probably even forgetting that we had ordered them, certainly not recognizing the "From" line it came from. It's a success story. Rare. You are welcome to scoff at it as being a stinky bandaid on a creaky mail system.
IMHO, the only way that Internet email can be cleaned up is to create an entirely new email architecture using an entirely new set of protcols with entirely new port assignments and no attempt whatsoever to maintain reverse compatibility with the existing architecture. That is a fair piece of work and requires a lot of people to get their heads out of the box and apply some creativity. Many will say that the effort is doomed before it starts because it is not compatible with what went before. I don't buy that argument at all.
In any case, a new architecture won't come about until we have some clarity of the requirements of the new architecture. And that probably has to be hashed out somewhere else, not on any existing mailing list.
If such a discussion does come about, I want people to understand that user-controlled permission is a much better fix than arbitrary spam filtering steps. There's a lot of inertia in the traditional spam filtering advice, and a certain amount of resistance to considering that the status quo does not represent e-mail nirvana. Think of it as making that "unsubscribe" at the bottom of any marketing e-mail actually work, without argument, without risk. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.