On Sat, 22 Mar 2003, Thomas Shaddack wrote: > > The intention is sender pays, recipient is paid, reflecting the > > real scarcity of readers time. Mailing lists would be sent > > out without postage, but with cryptographic signature, and > > subscribers would have to OK it. Letters to the list would be > > accompanied by payment, which would be something considerably > > less than a cent, which would yield a profit to the mailing > > list operators. > > However, it penalizes everyone without an infrastructure for electronic > payment. > > I don't own a creditcard suitable for Internet money transfers. I don't > need it (and the USD/CZK exchange rate makes everything quite expensive), > so for security reasons the option is disabled. Until recently, I hadn't a > creditcard at all. What would I be supposed to do in order to send mail, > then? What about public terminals, libraries? > > What about anonymous mails? Wouldn't it add either a high burden to the > remailer operators, or nullify the remailer purpose, adding a shining > payment trail right to the sender? > > What about improvised ad-hoc systems? When I have nothing other, I am able > to send a mail with just a telnet client. Would it be possible with the > new system too? > > It is another complication. Now not only the email infrastructure will > rely on the Net itself, on the DNS and on the SMTP servers, but > payment-transfer systems will be added to the equation, greatly affecting > reliability. > > The idea smells bad.
Agreed, provided we are talking about "payment" in the traditional sense (as this thread has been so far). However, there are other forms of payment besides money. As you correctly observed, not everyone has the ability to make payment in money over the net, however, everyone who is capable of connecting has the ability to pay in cpu cycles. A robust system would allow for payment in any number of mediums, allowing for universal participation. To date, my personal pet has been payment in computationally intensive solutions to questions posed by the recipient. This forced expenditure of effort, even if minor, removes the spammer's incentive for sending of email: the nature of the beast requires that the spam run be high volume and fast in order to pay off - slow down the run with computationally difficult questions, and the spammer will make no money. This system is one that has exponential impact on high-volume mailers, and almost zero impact on the person sending out a few dozen emails a day (to their friends, cpunx, etc.). It does not substantially penalize the legitimate user, while at the same time crippling the mass mailer. I have not understood why this system has never been taken seriously in the anti-spam "community", while at the same time we have unscalable and unimplementable micropayment systems being seriously studied. Could it be that the real concern driving the antispammers is the aquisition of money, rather than the aquisition of email without spam? -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
