Subject: [Asrg] SMTP & NNTP ?

From: Hadmut Danisch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 20:10:59 -0800

Just a simple question: Are we bound to focus
on e-mail/SMTP transport or do we cover 
News/NNTP as well?

(Sorry if this question was already discussed, 
I couldn't track all messages, especially after
I've been offline for a few days.)

Hadmut
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From: "Chris Lewis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 11:22:06 -0500

> on e-mail/SMTP transport or do we cover 

I would strongly recommend that we avoid News/NNTP issues. The dynamics 
and issues are considerably different, and News/NNTP spam generally is 
already under reasonable control.  From a practical standpoint, 
News/NNTP spamming is less of a problem than it was in the mid-late 
90's.  The IETF is far less interested in fiddling around with a 
protocol that is mature and declining in relative importance.

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From: [email-masked] (Claus Färber)
Date: 19 Mar 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Lewis <[email-masked]> schrieb/wrote:
> From a practical standpoint, News/NNTP spamming is less of a problem
> than it was in the mid-late 90's.  The IETF is far less interested in
> fiddling around with a protocol that is mature and declining in
> relative importance.

Netnews might be part of the solution to email spam. Netnews is quite
efficient at one-to-many communication and does not suffer from spam as
much as email does.

If mailing lists (and newsletters) can be moved to Netnews (or a similar  
scheme), we can make sending a large amount of messages more expensive  
without harming legitimate mailing lists.

Claus
-- 
http://www.faerber.muc.de/
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From: "Chris Lewis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 10:48:27 -0500

> without harming legitimate mailing lists.

True.  Usenet is probably the best way to distribute high volume mailing 
lists. Because, that is in effect what a newsgroup _is_.

But you find out that the Usenet broadcast medium mechanism only works 
when the traffic is of interest to a "significant" fraction of the 
population so that the bandwidth is amortised over more users.  A 
mailing list with only 5 members is grossly inefficient use of Usenet. 
Given that full Usenet feeds are already up in the 100Gb+/day range (as 
of a year or two ago!), it could not handle a paradigm shift of this nature.

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From: Chuq Von Rospach <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 08:34:40 -0800

On Wednesday, March 19, 2003, at 07:48  AM, Chris Lewis wrote:

> True.  Usenet is probably the best way to distribute high volume 
> mailing lists. Because, that is in effect what a newsgroup _is_.

I don't agree.

> mailing list with only 5 members is grossly inefficient use of Usenet.

the "send every byte everywhere in case anyone anywhere wants that 
byte" isn't a good paradigm except in cashes where the value of 
"anyone" is large. I think it's more tied to the size of the audience 
than the busyness of the list. USENET is also best for discussion, not 
distribution of read-only material (i.e. announce, e-marketing, etc). 
And authentication, spam and trolls are still issues (while spam on 
usenet may be more or less under control, spam aimed at email found on 
usenet isn't, making discussion lists on usenet problematic because 
you're gutting the ability to move discussions private)

then you add the problem that people use mail lists because they want 
e-mail, not usenet. I've done some experimentation with encouraging 
mail list users to other formats, and they've generally failed 
miserably. They're comfortable with it, they don't want to change. And 
some stuff will (and should) stay behind, so you start getting 
confusion about what's where, and what ought to go where.

I think the real future direction here is to supplement mail lists with 
alternative distribution mechanisms, not replace them. Making sure 
archives are on the web allows users to read lists without having them 
e-mailed to them; RSS feeds gives them the info they need to know what 
needs to be read without time wasted browsing. you turn a push/email 
list into a pull/RSS list without screwing it up for people who want it 
in the mailbox, but cut the e-mail traffic and the interruptions of 
mail dropping into the mailbox. The piece that is still somewhat 
missing on that, though, is posting back from an RSS feed, but you can 
work around that, and RSS is of most interest to the 'lurkers' in many 
cases, anyway...

I think forums and other web systems will start taking this content, 
too, as they continue to mature; especially the ones with multiple 
distribution methods that understand that content isn't tied to a 
distribution method, but to a user preference on receiving it.

In my view, announce-based content will likely stay e-mail as it's 
primarily a push paradigm anyway, although it ought to have an RSS 
function as well, while discussion content will move to the web, where 
users have a suite of delivery options, including email, web, or RSS 
and maybe NNTP -- e-mail isn't the thing, but one delivery tool for the 
thing.

FWIW, IMHO.

-- 
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
[email-masked] -- http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/

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From: wayne <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Mar 2003 10:47:32 -0600

> efficient at one-to-many communication and does not suffer from spam as

*sigh*

I started reading Usenet (netnews) about a week after the "great
renaming".  (It didn't seem to make sense to start a month earlier.)

I have long since stopped reading Usenet because of the spam problem
there.  I hear that the spam problem has decreased a lot in recent
years, but I suspect that is as much because email spam is more
effective at reaching large numbers of people than any other technical
reason.

Mailing lists give a lot more control over abusing users, whether they
spam or otherwise, and I doubt that you will ever see a mass migration
back to Usenet.

-wayne

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From: "Chris Lewis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 12:24:53 -0500

>>efficient at one-to-many communication and does not suffer from spam as

Careful about that.  I didn't write the above.

> years,

It has.  Most newsgroups outside of the various sewers in alt.* are 
quite good these days.

> but I suspect that is as much because email spam is more

Usenet spam is quite effective in terms of people reached/message. The 
reason for that is partially as you say.  But perhaps much more so 
because anti-spam on Usenet is vastly easier to do with Usenet than it 
is with email.

> spam or otherwise, and I doubt that you will ever see a mass migration

You're quite right there.

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From: "Alan DeKok" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 08:12:50 -0500

[email-masked] (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Claus_F=E4rber?=) wrote:
> Netnews is quite efficient at one-to-many communication and does not
> suffer from spam as much as email does.

  ... because of the design of the protocol.  You've got to request
netnews.  Spam gets forced down your throat.

  As I've said before, the structure of SMTP itself is a large part of
the reason for the spam problem.

  Alan DeKok.

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From: "Chris Lewis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 15:34:28 -0500

> netnews.  Spam gets forced down your throat.

You have to request email too.  NNTP and SMTP->POP is effectively the 
same w.r.t. push/pull.  They don't differ in this regard.  It's just as 
easy to not request email as to not request netnews.  Problem being is 
that email is used for 1-to-1, and "not requesting" email is 
considerably more unpleasant than not requesting netnews.

The only difference in this area is that NNTP already supports a certain 
amount of browser-requested-yet-server-side-implemented filtering.  Not 
well, and not well supported by existing browsers.

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From: [email-masked] (Claus Färber)
Date: 19 Mar 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Lewis <[email-masked]> schrieb/wrote:
> population so that the bandwidth is amortised over more users.

That's the method used for Usenet. But Netnews also includes private  
news servers and NNTP caches.

Claus