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ASRG is moving slooowwwlllyyy
Posted October 7, 2003 – 8:40 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in Spam and EmailThe ASRG is moving slowly towards its goals. Apparently that has been way tooo slow to some people. Recently, I ran across an post somewhere that was asking for a opinion of the ASRG. The response was not positive. It seems that many hardcore anti-spammers consider us either too soft-spined, consisting solely of goofy salesmen and kooks, or being pro-spam by pushing the notion of “consent” into email. Nothing arouses the passions of anti-spam fighters more than an wolf in sheep’s clothing - an anti-spam group pushing spam. Unfortunately, the consent framework has not made things better since it is in its early draft stage and its not too clear (in the words of an ASRG member “this thing looks like an insurance policy”).
We take on the notion of consent as a concept that would allow for unification of various anti-spam tools and proposals into once concrete architechture. This would not mean that senders get to see everyone’s consent - rather receivers can express consent or what kind of emails they want to receive, and the tools will enforce that decision. This would give the freedom to every user to pick and choose their anti-spam preferences in a standard way, while allowing various anti-spam tools to interpreted. However, in some ways this is akin to treating the symptoms of a decease instead of the cause. On one hand, if the email system allows for consent and denial of consent this would imply that less spam goes through. On the other hand, the fundamental problems causing spam do not go away. Long-term if the consent framework kills most spam, people would be satisfied since small amounts of spam only cause small problems. But changing the wiring of the Internet long-term might be an option.
The last comment I wanted to add is one about “herding cats”. This has been a phrase many times used to refer to getting engineers to work together, and in IETF/IRTF lingo has come to mean getting volunteers to do work. This has been a constant problem in all groups, not just the ASRG and sometimes is very frustrating. But those are the facts of life, and we are forced to work with what we have. So, I keep on “herding cats” and hopefully get the ASRG move along a bit more…
That’s all folks.
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