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Re: [Asrg] Economic model is borken. (sic.) Let's fix it

2003-03-11 20:13:44
At 1:06 PM -0500 3/11/03, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
drive off most spammers. Second, even if it does create one million legitimate e-mail advertisers, that is an improvement. Like it or not e-mail advertising is not going to go away. The best we can hope for is raising the

This is why I promised to go off and write a short summary of why spam is bad (not what it is--but just what is bad about it). One million legitimate e-mail advertisers could inflict far more damage on the network and email users than spam currently does. If stamps are set so low that existing bulk mailers can afford it, then they are set low enough that the tragedy of the commons still applies. The email in my inbox is still going to be trying to fool me into opening it--it's just that when I do, the contents won't be quite as offensive.

costs so it's minimized and use this opportunity to create the right cultural rules which are often stronger than legal rules.

To date we have not been terribly successful in creating a culture for cyberspace. The barbarians overran us at the gates. :-)

At the end of the day, the unintended side effects will be something that neither of us considered. And we will go around and try and solve that problem as well.

"Hi, we'd like you to install this complex infrastructure. We don't know if it will make things better. It might make things worse. But it *will* stop spam if everyone does it." We need to work on that marketing pitch :-).

At 1:15 PM -0500 3/11/03, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
Stamps are generated automatically through the outbound e-mail filter. see: http://www.camram.org/camram_engine.html section "Outbound messages"

No purchases necessary, no human interaction provides better user experience.

I just read your document. If she sends email without a stamp there is most certainly human interaction. You require the sender to download software to generate a stamp. Consider the fun a virus writer will have forging copies of that message.

An in any case, you still have to deliver the message, just in case it's important. Yes, it's in jail. So for an early adopter, all their received email ends up in the "bad message" folder. And any commercial senders, faced with either buying hardware to generate stamps, or just letting a few early adopters fetch their email out of the junk bucket, do the cheap thing--nothing.

At 1:46 PM -0500 3/11/03, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
Let me rephrase my comment them. The cost of sending e-mail on a low-end machine will probably the only about 30 or 40 seconds per address[1]. This

I'm not clear how you say the user won't notice. That's 40 seconds that the email client sits there saying "sending email" in it's (often modal) dialog box. And if you background it, you need to figure out how to deal with dialup users, who thought they had sent their email and can now disconnect, but actually can't yet. And that's just for one address. Sending a joke to all the people in your address book could get pretty annoying pretty fast--especially when 90% of your friends don't need the stamp in the first place. Again, the problem is that it's causing pain for early adopters, but not providing any benefits. (I'm starting to feel like a broken record*.)

On the other hand, as Vernon has pointed out, the high end machines don't seem to feel the pain. So, looking at this from the standpoint of who values their realtime more, we're hurting the end-user more than the spammer.

* I just dated myself, didn't I?
--
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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