Mail with no purpose?

Fri Apr 2 17:25:53 UTC 2004

>> Michel Py wrote:
>> In other words: if you're already to the point where
>> you are using a text-mode mail client or disabling
>> HTML and/or other stuff in a GUI client, you are no
>> loss to the spammer if your email does not confirm 
>> as valid (because you would not even read it nor buy
>> any of their crud in the first place).

> Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> So what you're saying is that these validation schemes
> are a good thing?

I was not thinking in terms of being good or not, as these schemes exist
and will likely continue whether we like it or not.

Trying to answer the question anyway:

It is clear that there is room for improvement in making these address
validation schemes less efficient. I will let the reader make their own
opinion whether this would be a good thing or not. It would be a good
thing in the sense that it would reduce the spammer's ability to focus
spam on known existing email addresses. It would be a bad thing in the
sense that in order to reach the same number of valid targets the
spammer would then send a lot more email, knowing that large numbers are
invalid.

The lesser of two evils: let's say that potentially we could force
spammers to send 100 times more emails for the same result. Some will.
Are we ready to bounce 99% of email traffic?

Michel.