AccuSpam rebuttal to [ASCR REPLY: Response from the Anti-Spam Community Registry]

[AccuSpam <support@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We do not wish to discourage useful projects in anti-spam or create animosity,
and we wish the Anti-Spam Community Registry (ASCR) the best luck in
implementing any plan they wish to.

However, since apparently this supposed to be the official forum to make
comments about ICANN .mail proposal, we feel compelled to rebutt what we think
are harmful effects of the proposal.

This rebuttal uses same line of analysis in our April 12, 2004 post, ".mail
fails the basic theoretical test for anti-spam".

>ASCR wrote:
>...The majority of comments on our .Mail proposal have been positive...

I did not read all but out of   48 total comments, I read already 23 that are
negative and only 3 that are positive.


>ASCR wrote:
>...These are large entities that have problems now
>with their genuine mail being filtered as spam.
>Think in terms of eBay notices, Amazon.com purchase...
...
>...it will be able to aid in making these types of fraudulent spams
>a thing of the past, which is of great importance both to you and
>to the companies who are victimized...


You proposing every recipient to filter their email differently for the benefit
of a few companies.

You can not guarantee that every recipient receives email from those companies,
but for the proposal to benefit those few companies then every potential
recipient (which means everyone) has to endure the hassle of
changing/augmenting their spam filtering.

You proposing to convert the problem of a few companies and make it a cost for
every recipient, without doing anything to actually eliminate spam for the
majority of email.


>ASCR wrote:
>...In terms of small businesses and individual users,
>the concern that you need a .Mail for your mail to get
>through is a misconception


Agreed.  You are creating a system which only benefits a few senders, but
burdens all recipients with a new format they have to recognize.

A proliferation of fragmented email systems is not a solution to spam problem. 
It is an increasing cost of the use of email generally.


>ASCR wrote:
>As such, we're putting the initial higher costs on larger corporations who
>will also be the initial user community. To be perfectly clear, there is no
>cost to the end-user.

Absolutely false.  The opposite.  You are taking a very expensive problem that
large corporations have (forgery of their business email to customers) and
making all recipients of email suffer with a new format which does nothing to
reduce their spam measurably and does nothing for the majority of email.

In communications theory, you are essentially creating a side-band for email,
which feeds into the general band, and thus requires everyone in the general
band to be side-band compatible.

So to make it clear, you are decreasing costs for large corporations ($2000 is
a bargain to solve their forgery problem) and passing that costs on to general
email as a new format that everyone has to be aware of and compatible with, but
which provides no benefits to majority of email.


>ASCR wrote:
>It is offered in the same manner that The Spamhaus Project
>has offered its other anti-spam tools to the email community
>for many years.


If Spamhaus or ASCR want to create a database of "safe emailers" and then
recommend the use of "reverse dns" for those emailers, then it does not need to
create a new .mail domain to test it's projects.  Test the project using your
own database and existing "reverse dns" techniques (which can work within
existing DNS without new domain) in the market first and see if there is demand
from most recipients.

Thanks,
Shelby Moore
AccuSpam.com