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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html

Internet Mail 2000 IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility.

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Bernstein is an incredibly smart guy. But he's also an example of how the social stuff matters. His software would run the internet if he put a little more effort into the social/political side of things.

The big problem with IM2000 is that it doesn't solve the real problems. It's focused on the economics of storage of mail, which, yeah, are a thing for a few mail administrators, but generally is considered less important than the spam-filtering problem in general.

I mean, I'm not willing to pay for infinite storage, but I certainly would be willing to pay the cost of receiving 100x my current monthly spam load if I didn't have to read any of it. Maybe even 1000x.

The major benefit of the IM2000 standard is that if you can squash the spammer's mail servers, you squash the mail in question, which actually could change things, because it would mean that spammers would need to control the servers they use to send for longer than they do now.

That his software does not "run the internet" does not make it any less good. It's there for whoever chooses to use it.

That he focuses on the software instead of pandering probably makes his software better than the alternatives that aim to please even the most foolish of users. At least I think so.

Maybe I interpreted the proposal incorrectly, but I always saw IM2000 (minus the "notifications") as a "pull" solution.

By contrast, conventional email relies on "pushing" spam to the recipient (in practice, a middleman called an "email provider").

A smart IM2000 recipient perhaps would not pull spam from the sender's server.

As such, the spam would never enter the network. It would just sit on the sender's server.

Therefore, IM2000 not only conserves storage but also conserves bandwidth.

"A smart IM2000 recipient perhaps would not pull spam from the sender's server."

Based on what criteria? You wouldn't have the message headers/content, so you couldn't filter based on that. All you can filter on is the IP address. But you can already do that with SMTP by just responding with a 5xx code as soon as the sending server connects anyway... Or you could actually fetch the message and then spam filter it. But then, you may as well use SMTP...

What difference does it make which side initiates the TCP connection? If I was a spammer, IM2000 wouldn't concern me one little bit.

> ... because it would mean that spammers would need to control the servers they use to send for longer than they do now.

This is the reason IM2000 is exciting. Spammers only survive using hit and run tactics. We might see a 99% reduction in total generated spam.

Really? More than 99% of the junk email in my box is from "legitimate" senders who use their own mailservers. The truth of the matter is that it's already pretty easy to block the hit and run spammers. Most of the junk that gets through is sent by people with the resources to bully the spamfilters into accepting it.

Spam is viagra ads and the like (unsolicited commercial email). Promotional emails from companies you have a relationship with are a different thing. Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam.

SMTP is not where email organization should happen. That's what email clients are for. Blocking DoS attacks and spam makes sense. Blocking Amazon Kindle promotions does not.

>Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam.

See, you still seem to think that it's a negotiation between the senders and the receivers.

My point is that you don't have the right to the end-user's attention. If the end-user wants to hire someone to filter out messages they don't want to read, using whatever criteria for "don't want to read" that they like, this is the user's right.

(more relevant to the discussion, the email that is technically spam is pretty easy to block already, so a solution that requires a lot of social/political change is inferior to the technical measures we have in place.)

Re-read the bit you quoted.

> Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam.

i.e. Yes, it should be the user's control, not the hosting company's, not the sending server's.

If it's all the same to you, it seems to me that everybody and their mother has a daily or bi-daily newsletter advertising things I don't care about. I think maybe 15 companies are responsible for the vast majority of mail arriving in my inbox, and I care for none of it. Marketing routinely mistakes quantity for quality, as if yelling your message louder is sufficient for mindshare.

I'm really glad that gmail sorts these emails into a place where I don't have to ignore them, because I used to flag them as spam whether or not I might have accidentally given consent 10 years ago by buying something once. It was making email as useful as physical mail(read: not at all).

Just because I bought something from you once does not mean we have a relationship, just as a one-night stand does not entitle you to ask me to help you move.

I used to have your problem, then I clicked on the "unsubscribe" link in those 15 company's emails and now I mostly just get email from real people and robots I need information from.

Spam is anything that clogs my inbox and makes the emails I want to receive harder to find.

But I agree, SMTP is not where email organization should happen. Blocking illegitimate senders at the protocol level is the most that should be done, and the blocking of unwanted content should be pushed into a more user oriented layer. Current structure isn't optimal.

> Spam is viagra ads and the like (unsolicited commercial email). Promotional emails from companies you have a relationship with are a different thing. Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam.

If you didn't ask my permission to send me those promotional emails, they absolutely are spam and anyone who sends them should have their emails blocked. This rationalization that spamming is ok because the recipient is a customer and there is an unsubscribe mechanism is delusional self-interest.

Its also law. Do Not Call for instance doesn't apply to companies you have a relationship with. That's why some major banks 'affiliate' with 100's of companies, essentially selling the right to spam their customers.

Its screwed up, sure. But its the state we're in right now.

I made no claims about legality. Yes, CAN SPAM means you can spam legally. It doesn't make unsolicited commercial email anything other than spam.

Your inbox != the internet. The majority of email traffic has been spam for a decade now.

99% of them have unsubscribe buttons, too.

You might like http://the.mailman.ninja/

If mail storage is the sender's responsibility, then perhaps senders should be allowed to seed their outgoing messages directly from their personal and home devices, and rely on others who have included their identity in their web-of-trust\address-book to propagate notifications of changes to their outbox, without relying on their ISP to do so.

If the sender did not have at least one personal device connected to the internet 24/7, then they can perhaps purchase storage and bandwidth from a competitive online market, similar to the seedbox market for torrents, without surrendering their online identity or address to a commercial entity.

It would probably be possible to build a system like this on top of https://ipfs.io/, see https://github.com/ipfs/apps/issues/10 for example

Anything which loses immutability loses in my book. Once I get an email it's my own copy, and it never goes away. How I'm reading im2000, the sender can retract or change the message, because they have the copy. I guess if I marked every message as "keep a copy for me" as soon as I read it, it would be OK - hard to do that while not having to read spam just in case I want to keep a copy though.

Detecting moifications can be solved with a hash or signature of the message that is sent out and always kept by the recipient. Doesn't solve the retracting though, or the social aspects of what to do if you actually detect a hash mismatch.

IM2000 is a good idea. However, I would propose at least one additional idea [0]: Linked attachments. That should drastically reduce storage space in a corporate environment.

[0] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/better_email.html

This is also the crux of the streams concept [1][2] posted here a few months back. I have even started an implementation as a side project.

1 - http://tonsky.me/blog/streams/ 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9829614

In wich ways is this different and superior to a fee?

People have tried and failed with fee-based email before (e.g. HashCash). I do wonder if the postal service could do something here: every citizen has an address, people pay some pittance to deliver mail to that address, and it's a federal crime to tamper with that email. Physical junk mail is annoying, but nowhere near as bad as spam.

Because spammers can't afford a couple of TB of disk space?

Spammers using botnets could not use hit and run tactics. Spammer would need reliable server that stays up long time and receive requests. One way to fight spam would be to actually retrieve it and throw it into trash. It would be equal to DOS-attack.

There would be more time to determine if the message is spam. If enough people mark it as spam and site is blacklisted or taken down, spam would be removed from everyone.

If storage is the sender's responsibility, then there would most likely be no reason for recipients to ever bother downloading unsolicited messages from addresses originating outside of their web of trust in the first place.

You could push spam blocking to the end user and client, and simply let them not download messages originating from unknown origins (similar to phone + Caller ID), without having to worry about dealing with spam in a centralized manner.

The problem is not the few kilobytes of body. The problem is the slot that the notification takes up in my inbox and attention, which IM2000 does nothing to solve.

Well none of this is happening unless we are using a new mail protocol, and if we are using a new protocol we might as well throw in the kitchen sink and give you a new mail transfer agent and mail client application as well.

And in the new application: Address == Public Key, Address book == web of trust.

Your mail agent probably doesn't even bother to check or propagate incoming message notifications from addresses you haven't manually added to your address book (100% trust), or addresses within a certain number of hops from someone you manually added to your address book (friends of friend, boss's employees, etc.). And the mail client could further hide and ignore all of the notifications from below a certain user customizable trust score as well.

If storage is the sender's responsibility, then not only can they potentially get some of your attention, but also your location, what kind of device(s) you use to get email, when you're active, and precisely what kind of content is enticing you to click and what isn't.

A very tight feedback loop for generating content that will trick you, and hosting it for just long enough to see if it works.

What do you mean? A single message/template sent to a million people would be a couple KB... only the ongoing operational costs of hosting the server... Beyond that, blacklisting would be more affective if there was a pull based email model.

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