RE: [Asrg] Thoughts so far

At 12:44 AM 3/19/2003 -0500, Kee Hinckley wrote:
> At 10:00 AM -0800 3/18/03, Steve Schear wrote:
> > parties.  It doesn't require major changes to the email infrastructure, 
> > though clients would need to be enhanced (web-based email could add this 
> > almost immediately, plug-ins may suffice for some, like Eudora), nor new 
> > legislation.  Initial users may find they become less "reachable" to 
> > casual contacts, but that should only last a short while if sender-pays 
> > becomes popular.
> Why would such a system become popular?  Adopting it either burns your 
> business or doesn't stop spam (depending on which policy you take for 
> unstamped mail).  And on top of it, it costs you time and money to send 
> email, while all your friends and competitors get to send for free.
> In addition, a sender-pays system would be actively fought by every major 
> online publication, every major software company, and every free web mail 
> service.  And if you priced it cheaply enough that they wouldn't complain, 
> it would be so cheap as to have no impact on spam.
Well, until the elements for a sender-pays system are available none of us 
will know the impact.  As to being fought by commercial interests, I'm not 
sure that will matter to me and many others. Because our vision of 
sender-pays can be entirely end-user controlled it is our decision if we 
cut ourselves off from the herd in order to ensure our peace of mind.
If you take a look at http://www.camram.org you'll see that it includes 
features for a "jail" to hold possible spam.  The client can inspect the 
email and decide to let it in even if the postage isn't attached and add it 
to their white list (e.g., vendor email in response to a 
subscription).  Additionally, initiating contact with a party can 
implicitly add them to the white list, easing interaction with existing 
systems.

> Also, as recently discussed on this list.  CPU-based stamps suffer from 
> similar problems.  The claim was that an algorithm easy enough to be 
> useable by an end-user on a slow computer would be so easy as to allow a 
> fast computer to saturate a T3.
This aspect of PoW stamps was keenly discussed on the Camram list. Yes, its 
true that the balance might require that PDA, cellphone and older CPUs 
would need to spend a fair amount of time per stamp generation in order to 
maintain an effective barrier to spammers, but these less fortunate folk 
could also opt to use stamp generator proxies at either their ISP or 3rd 
parties (maybe P2P meshes).  And over time the computation burden for stamp 
minting would need to be slowly increased to stay ahead of increasing 
general and specail purpose HW spammers might employ.
Free email services accommodating PoW could require that the client's CPU 
perform the stamp generation using a Java applet.
steve

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