[IP] yahoo to use public key technology foranti-spam

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+@ux13.sp.cs.cmu.edu
Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2003 14:02:49 -0800
From: Ed Gerck <egerck@nma.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] yahoo to use public key technology foranti-spam
To: dave@farber.net

Yahoo! may have missed the most important point in communications.
Just as it is true for a phone call, the most important email for a company
(or you) is not an email that you send ...but the email that you receive.

Thus, adding an ad hoc, non-standard way to block email is simply making
more and more likely that an important message will NOT be received by
Yahoo! users -- irrespective of their efforts. And, not to be left behind,
we may expect that AOL and MS-hotmail will also be offering their
own non-standard way to block email and separate their usersf rom the
"other" users.

In other words, while there is value for users in NOT blocking
a communication they may receive, there is value for providers in
separating the users in the providers' own corrals of "standards".

We saw this happen before, before TCP/IP. We should be developing
an interworking solution and going back to basics -- how can
we trust a communication we receive? How can we define trust
in terms of a machine-machine dialogue, in way that reflects
what we understand by trust and have learned to use in 1,000's
of years of commerce and communication exchange? If he Internet
world parallels the real world, why should how we trust a message
be different?

Cheers,
Ed Gerck

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