On Mon, 1 Dec 1997, Vadim Antonov wrote:
John R. Levine wrote:
The problem is that it is of great value to me that any of the 100 million legitimate users on the net can easily send me e-mail and I can respond to them equally easily, and a "solution" that cuts them out to get rid of the spammers is cutting off your nose, both ears, and about nine fingers, to spite your face.
That's one big mistake. Before anybody will easily send you e-mail he has to get your address from somewhere and determine somehow that the person is interested in hearing from you. That process can just as well include obtaining personal or community authorization.
Erm, say you put your address on a webpage. Now, whats the difference between someone clicking it and sending you some 'signed' email (the key being on the page or embedded in the mailto: tag or some crap), and an email-address-grabbing-webcrawler grabbing your email address AND the signing information too? Whoops, that idea goes out the window. No matter how you put it on the page, I'm sure someone will write a program that is intelligent enough to extract the info. Adrian