--- "Dr. Jeffrey Race" <jrace@attglobal.net> wrote:

Please read the details in the text. It is all spelt out there.

Well, when I read the abstract, I also got the impression that the approach recommended was to "filter first, ask questions later." There were a few flaws in the assumptions: 1) Profitable, well-run companies always use BCPs. Simply put, unless you define "profitable and well-run" to mean "uses BCPs" what you will find is that some networks which have an admirable adherence to best practices afte often not profitable, while many networks which do not are quite profitable. 2) A consensus-based emergent governance will solve the problem. This is a fallacy, as Douglas Hofstadter demonstrated in Metamagical Themas: he ran an iterated prisoner's dilemma-type game among logicians (!) to see whether they would all demonstrate cooperative behavior, and to his surprise (but not to anyone else's), they did not. In fact, if the ISP community were to sign on to such a system in the same ratio as the logicians did in Hofstadter's experiment, we would have the exact same solution which we have now: which is a multitude of small-scale approximate solutions to the same problem. The second piece of the fallacy is the idea that emergent systems can be predicted: there is a reason they're called "Emergent" systems - they arise from the discrete actions of the constituent members rather than from design. Any attempt to build a system to have a certain outcome is by definition not an emergent system. 3) The abstract does come across as overzealous - if you are proposing a "draft," you should expect to receive positive and negative comments. In fact, you should probably modify the draft to answer the negative comments received. 4)The area of the "spamverse" would steadily shrink in importance and relevance. Even assuming that everything else were as you describe, and that the BCP ISPs would be willing to suffer the customer pain of not being able to communicate with the non-BCP ISPs, what would keep the spammers from finding another technological solution? Why would you think that they would not employ their (considerable) technical skill to getting around any mechanism we employ? The Cantor Diagonal method could apply here: it is impossible to predict every possible situation. The spammers are highly motivated (big $$), and the simple fact which most people ignore is this: Spam works If Spam didn't generate money, people wouldn't do it. I think that any solution will have to involve getting people to not respond to spam, and steadily raising the cost of sending mass email, so that there will be a financial disincentive to do so. Just my $.02. ===== David Barak -fully RFC 1925 compliant- __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/