(John Gilmore 2002)
What makes the Internet so valuable to everyday people is that you can
reach anyone, on ANY email system, through it. There were many email
systems before the Internet, but they didn't catch the broad public
interest. If we continue the current process of anti-spam-driven
Balkanization (I can send email to Joe, and he can send to Nancy, but
I can't send to Nancy myself, because Nancy's ISP is filtering me), we
will destroy the value that we created when we linked all these
networks with a common email protocol. We might as well go back to
having separate un-linked networks, like MCI Mail and Compuserve and
AOL and UUCP and BITNET and FidoNet. You'd just have to become a
customer of that provider, and use its idiosyncratic interface, if you
want to send mail to its customers. Remember that world? If not,
you're lucky. But your luck is running out, because the "solutions"
that people continue proposing and backing and implementing to "the
spam problem" will result in that.
THE REAL SOLUTION is to build and use mail-reading tools that learn
the reader's preferences, discarding or de-prioritizing mail that the
reader is unlikely to care about. Every person can choose what
tool(s) they want to use to read their email. This is a very close
relationship; I spend hours every day with my mail-reading software.
Most of the info is already there about what I prefer, based on what I
do with each message as I see it; the software just has to start
remembering and using it -- unlike the extremely uninformed
relationship between you and everyone who might want to send you
email. If your software throws away an important message, you have
nobody to blame but yourself (or your vendor), and you have the
ability to fix the problem (perhaps by changing vendors). If your
software shows you too many uninteresting messages, again you have
both the incentive and the ability to fix it yourself. Your
preferences are kept locally, under your control, rather than having
your detailed "profile of interests" handed over to people like
advertisers, governments, or your (kind-hearted I'm sure) ISP. In
such a system, knowledge of your interests will only be used to
benefit YOU, not those third parties. You don't need to let anyone
else know that you have a fetish for shiny leather boots, or that you
secretly like People magazine. This is a far better solution than
trying to impose the cost of "filtering out the mail that you wish not
to see" on your ISP, on every other ISP in the world, or on every
other sender in the world.
Also, such mail-reading tools provide far more useful capabilities
than merely filtering out spam. Have you ever dropped out of a high-
volume mailing list because you really only cared about a fraction of
the messages in it? A competent interest-based reader would let you
still read the fraction which you care about, while shielding you from
the intermingled irrelevant messages.