[Asrg] attention bonds, was Email Postage

[Steve Atkins]

On Nov 25, 2008, at 8:21 AM, Al Iverson wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 9:17 AM, mathew <meta at pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> ...and so on. Offering nothing positive, these naysayers shoot down  
>> every
>> proposal with the same tired objections that have been addressed  
>> over and
>> over and over as unreasonable or out of touch with reality.
>
> As one of the naysayers, please allow me to encourage everybody who
> thinks they can build such a thing to go do it. I think it's possible.
> It just takes many millions of dollars, and it won't cover all email,
> leaving some pretty big gaps.
>
> Look at Goodmail....Daniel did it, is doing it. He didn't spend a
> month of Sundays debating it with geeks on a list. Notice a difference
> in approach there? Look REALLY closely. (DID IT, vs CRYING ABOUT HOW
> PEOPLE ARE SO MEAN ABOUT IT NOT BEING A GREAT IDEA.)
>
> Look at DNSBLs -- an example of a spam filtering mechanism that is
> commonly accepted as best practice, even though it is heavily debated
> by geeks and non-geeks. SORBS, Spamhaus, etc., they just went ahead
> and did it. They decided the rules and decided to sell themselves, see
> if they can drive recipient sites to agree and use their filters. To
> varying degrees, of course, and some DNSBLs are run by morons. But
> again, what's the difference there? Less debating, more doing.
>
> Lessons to learn: There is no need to announce an e-Postage system on
> this, or any other, geek-laden discussion list. If you do, you will be
> pelted with eggs. If you want to make something happen, go make
> something happen. Build it, then try to get people to come.

Conversely, if you try and build it and fall into exactly the
problems that either you didn't find out about because you didn't
ask people who know what they're talking about, or because
you did ask them but didn't want to believe or dig into the details
of the replies, you'll end up having wasted an awful lot of time
and effort that could have been avoided, and likely have people
pointing and laughing.

But when you get to the point of insulting people about how
they're wrong and you're right, you've probably extracted all
the wisdom you're going to get from that group of people, and
it's probably time to go and implement something.

In protocol development circles there's nothing much more
compelling than successfully interoperating implementations.

Cheers,
   Steve