I was one of the first people to propose e-stamps for internet
mail. I have since renounced the idea.
Fully detailed reasons are at:
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spume/estamps.html
But in short:
a) You can't get there from here, since you can't reject mail
that is unstamped until lots of people use stamps and nobody
will want to use stamps unless people are demanding them.
b) CPU coins are better than money but still face problem (a)
c) Putting an artifical cost on something that was designed to
be cheap is a lousy answer.
d) It has free speech implications. (in both senses of the word.)
e) Mailing lists are a problem.
f) Major virus problem if you use real money
On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 09:14:20AM +0900, Shannon Jacobs wrote:
I'm surprised to see so little focus so far on the underlying cause of the
problem. The economic model of email is fundamentally broken, and that
CREATES the spam problem. "We have met the enemy, and they is us."
That e-mail is very efficient is a feature, not a bug. I would be
loathe to give it up. The "internet cost contract" -- namely I pay
for my end of the wire and you pay for your -- is what made the internet
great, let's not tear it down if we can avoid it.
Now I agree that the super-cheapness of bulk mail (some say that
the problem is that spam transfers cost from sender to recipient, but
the truth is it's super cheap for both of them, and spammers would still
spam if they had to pay the real cost of the whole transmission.)
is at the root cause of spam. But it's a feature. We want it for
our regular mailing lists.
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