ximian evolution

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Derek Marin wrote:
> measures like this one, while well-intentioned, will only serve to
> irritate some segment of the legitimate user community who are not
> content to use the Internet as they would a TV, but will do very little
> to prevent spam.  Real spammers will not be hindered by such measures...

Absolutely right on the money.

Robert L Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> (In my own experience when I've done system administration, I've
> always found it a lot easier to use a central smart relay anyway.)

There are a number of reasons *not* to want to use someone else's smart relay:

- You are adding at least one more point of failure
- The mail will often take longer to get through, and delivery won't be as
predictable
- Big beefy mail servers are less scaleable (and require more sysadmin effort/
upgrades to maintain stability as traffic increases) than simply letting each
user's computer do the work
- It can be tapped or logged more easily by crackers or snoopy government
officials
- Delivery rules will likely change unpredictably over time, causing messages
to get munged, truncated, tagged as spam, or otherwise mutilated
- If implemented on a large scale, centralization could lead to increasing
costs to consumers

I do *not* support any attempt to centralize the decentralized architecture of
peer-to-peer network applications, most *especially* SMTP.

As a method of combatting spam, "smart" relays are a non-starter; in fact I'd
call them "stupid".  I like having my very own SMTP server, thank y'all very
much.

There are better ideas out there.

Besides, since when did the Linux user community look to the likes of AOL for
engineering improvements to our collective Internet experience?  ;-)

-rich