On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Elric Pedder wrote:
This proposal is made quite often, but I cannot see how it
would work.
SMTP does not require the participation of any ISP other than
for the transmission of packets. In order to levy a charge,
the ISP would have to monitor your traffic, detect SMTP
usage, detect actual e-mail delivery, and bill you for it.
Unfortunately port 25-destined traffic does not actually
cost any more than other-port-destined traffic. Therefore
in a competitive marketplace prices will be driven down to
cost+margin.
I think this reasoning is absolutely correct for leased line customers,
but if an ISP had a mail server that could count messages by submitter (I
know of none that do so) it could easily advertise "100 messages free per
day". The advantage to the ISP would be that spammers wouldn't bother to
register fake accounts to send millions of messages, and the limitation of
100 messages per day wouldn't discourage legitimate dial-up customers the
way a charge for each message would.
In fact, a marketing person might say that "100" sounds bigger than
"unlimited" to the average person. Surely that is why AOL promises
"1000 free hours" rather than "unlimited use for a month".
I really think the inability of sendmail and its ilk to count messages by
actual sender (not envelope or header addresses) is a major source
of the spam problem. SMTP AUTH is a mechanism which would allow such
counting, perhaps someday it will be used.
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