Venema on Spam

I'm grateful for physicist Wietse Venema's contributions (satan, the coroner's toolkit, TCP Wrappers, and Postfix) to the computer security world, but I certainly Venema's anti-spam solution never gets implemented:

The best theoretic solution is to change the email distribution model, but this may never happen. Right now, email is a "push" technology where the sender has most of the control, and where the receiver bears most of the cost.

The alternative is to use a "pull" model, where the sender keeps the email message on their own server until the receiver downloads it. For example, when my bank wants to send me email, they would send a short message with an URL to view their mail, and my email software would download the message for me. This assumes of course that my email software recognizes my bank's email digital signature and their Web site's SSL certificate, otherwise we would have a phishing problem. Legacy mail software would tell the user that they have email at their bank, and leave it up to the user to download their email.

The "pull" model would change the economics of email. It would move the bulk of the cost from the receivers where it is now, to the senders where it belongs. No-one would read email if its sender doesn't provide a service where recipients can download it from.

Except that his proposed "pull" model would change the incentives in such a way that email uers' would not opt-in. Blackberries and the like use a "push" model today so that busy execs (or wannabe middle managers) can read email while in the tube trains without connectivity. Gmail wants to have that message pulled down and indexed, ready for searching (a different set of security issues). Not to mention that the users will now have to make decisions about whether or not to "pull" email based on just the meta information, not full content inspection (e.g. sender's address and subject line). What happens when my friend is hijacked and has his outgoing mailbox full of spam or viruses destined for me? I would have to tell without the details. Often, I cannot tell whether something is worth reading without skimming the body of the message. It could be my bank telling me my statement is available or that they want to offer me yet another home equity loan (the former is interesting; the latter is junk). It's just not going to work.

I'm all in favor of changing economics of the situation. I just don't think this has it.