About Bill Volk's anti-spam proxy server idea...
I've been following this discussion over the past few days. First of
all, Curt's message listing 4 big challenges is right on the money.
Any FAQ maintainers listening...?
I independently had the same idea as Curt for dealing with my mobile
mail (proxy server to "floating" @docomo address). He kindly sent me
his scripts, although I ended up implementing my own version with
procmail (posted at 2003-07/0093.html). Of course, anybody who's gone
through the trouble of doing this has certainly thought about wider
marketability. In addition to the four that Curt mentioned, let me add
two more philosophical issues...
1. Essentially, you're promising a "lifetime E-mail address" (or at
least one that you don't have to change much). Once you get a critical
mass of users on any one service, the spammers are going to start
trying to get to your users. Then you're left in the position of
trying to re-invent the wheel and compete with the carrier's own
anti-spam efforts. Granted, you don't have the conflict of interest
where you still make packet revenue from spammers, and you might be
able to finance the labour cost as a "premium" spam-reduced service,
but ... now you have to deal with two possible spam intrusions: one at
the forwarded domain, and one at the original mobile E-mail address.
Seems pretty hard to make any guarantees in this space...
2. About the original question about POP E-mail, users in Japan
currently have three options:
1 - The default, built-in mail client
2 - Webmail via browser (AOL, etc.)
3 - POP (or IMAP) via Java appli or whatever -- e.g., the excellent
"i-nPOP" client
Why does everybody use #1? Because it works -- fast, simple, and most
importantly, MAIL IS PUSHED TO THE PHONE. You don't "check" your
E-mail ... it comes to you.
The North American carriers have mostly gone with the #2 (Webmail)
approach, which is a complete disaster for usability because manual
checking is almost always required, and because the browser isn't
optimized for this application, it's slower than #3 (the appli
approach).
Why did they do this? Precisely the reason you described. Multi-way
access! Get your E-mail from your mobile, your desktop, a web kiosk,
or anybody who wants to "partner" with us! Sounds good from a business
standpoint, but uptake rates show the true problem of usability.
--
Finally, (shameless plug) I do mobile usability work in North America
and Japan for real-world assessments on these kinds of issues...
-- Joseph Luk
Received on Sun Nov 23 08:39:54 2003