[Asrg] Email Postage (was Re: FeedBack loops)

[Barry Shein]

On November 14, 2008 at 20:38 steve at blighty.com (Steve Atkins) wrote:
 > 
 > Because email is, fundamentally, about people.
 > 
 > People want to get email from their friends, their family, their  
 > colleagues and their acquaintances. The vast majority also want to get  
 > mail from companies they've bought from or expressed an interest in  
 > (within reasonable constraints), organizations they're members of and  
 > so on. And they also want to receive serendipitous mail from strangers.
 > 
 > Naive blocking based on lack of SPF record, lack of DKIM signature or  
 > lack of X-Herring: Red header breaks that. And breaking that, breaks  
 > email.
 > 
 > The vast majority (though not quite all) ISPs understand that their  
 > role is to make their subscribers happy, and breaking email is not a  
 > good way to do that.

In some ways I ;ike your description a lot.

But as an ISP let me also remind you that people being flooded with
spam also "breaks email".

We get heated complaints about both, false positives and too much spam.

As one example, we still have quite a few dial-up customers.

At V.92 50kbps, a practical limit, that's about 5 kilobytes/second
ideally, or about 17MB/hour.

A call about a 50+MB mailbox which would take almost 3 hours to move,
message by message or the whole thing, same problem, isn't unusual at
all. And I mean with all the various spamassassin, procmail, etc.
mechanics in place.

Most people don't want to spend 3 hours making a single pass on their
mailbox. Or, if they download the whole thing before reading locally,
3 hours before they see the first message. Particularly if there are
only several messages they actually want to see in there.

So, although the sentiment expressed above is appreciated and a
reasonable ideal, in practice we don't live in such an ideal world.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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