At 11:52 AM +0000 3/5/03, Matt Sergeant wrote:
I'm new on the list so forgive me if this has been mentioned already (the
archives don't seem complete).
No kidding. I looked at the archives and thought, "Boy, this is low
volume for a list about spam." Then I got today's email!
It seems to me that sender pays means the third world gets excluded from
email communication. Whether it's actual money or if it's just CPU cycles,
that model simply doesn't work for a group of people trying to communicate
effectively with "richer" nations. You might as well just use
This is not an obviously solvable problem. What we love about email
is that it allows anybody to communicate with anybody on an equal
basis. Anyone who argues that we need to move to a sender-pays model
is going to inherently screw with that beauty. To strike a balance,
you need to move the bulk of the cost to bulk senders, and give the
individuals a free ride.
Spammers will, however, find ways around that. Even a system in
which all email is "identified" doesn't prevent people from adopting
multiple identities. In addition, spammers may elicit help of
individuals (willingly or unwillingly). We've already seen some
trojan spam software. And reportedly some "free" porn sites are
asking their users to periodically type in the text that see in a
graphic image--an image that they snarfed from the automatic signup
for a free email account. (The irony of a computer enlisting the
help of the distributed computing capabilities of human pattern
recognition is lovely.)
None of which is to say that we shouldn't use such a model. Merely
that we need to figure out what the unintended consequences are, and
whether the cost of the new model outweighs the cost of the
consequences.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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