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Re: [Asrg] Fwd: Major E-mail Delivery for FTC DNCR Launch

2003-06-28 00:19:39
At 06:40 PM 6/26/03 -0600, Vernon Schryver wrote:
[...]

I think switching to sender pays is impossible, even if it were
desirable or practical with some other history.  Except in the
perverted cases where big advertisers pay big sellers of "eyes,"
there are insurmountable practical problems in authorization,
authentication, and general accounting.  Sender pays for email
makes just as much sense as sender-pays-per-IP-packet, which about
15 years after it was first pushed, makes even less sense. 
(Yes, I've heard of peering fees and approximations to "settlements".)


I've seen many /technically/ workable sender pays variants.
Here's a simple one that bypasses the need for special accounting;
Place a minimum size on a message of 10 Megabytes.
Any message that is too small, is simply rejected with a
"555 message to small, pad to 10,000,000 bytes".

Note that this is backward compatible with most email clients,
since it's relatively easy to attach a 10 meg file,
and does not require 100% adoption before it works.

(If the reader is a fan of some other "sender pays" variant and
 thinks this is silly, consider for a moment why this is silly, 
 but your pet "sender pays" is not.)


Of course, "technically possible" is not the same as "desirable".
Unless both the sender and the receiver perceive strong benefits
to change, the system will not change.  

I /like/ cheap email, and I'm very much opposed to anything which
might change that.  I do not think I'm alone.
I would hazard a guess that if someone tried to increase the price,
say by legislating a tax, that I would use SMTP on a different
port "just amongst my friends" and it wouldn't take long before
those on the "friends" network encompassed the entire internet.


Scott Nelson <scott(_at_)spamwolf(_dot_)com>


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