3. The mailing list should not focus on implementing its own
Micropayment
architecture, but rather:
(a) Determine whether a working micropayment architecture would
represent
a feasible solution to SPAM
(b) Determine whether an E-Postage system would create a unique set of
requirements for a working micropayments architecture.
(c) Attempt to ballpark a set of parameters that describe the boundary
conditions necessary to make an E-Postage system feasible. ...
... which remains entirely hypothetical since nobody has any idea how
to build a micropayment system within a couple of orders of magnitude
of what you'd need for any plausible e-mail system. The unique
requirement is be that the vast majority of attempted transactions
would be bogus which rules out a lot of statistical approaches, but
it's the scale that's the killer.
Not sure whether I necessarily buy into this assertion:
One size does not fit all, and an anti-SPAM solution that is appropriate
for one set of mail exchanges will not necessarily be applied to all mail
exchanges.
When I think about email, I differentiate between two different types of
transactions:
One set of exchanges occurs went I communicate with a relatively small
group of individuals with whom I have some sort of trust relationship:
This includes:
(a) The people that I work with
(b) My friends
(c) My family
These transactions encompass the vast majority of the emails that I send
and receive.
Equally significant, they don't require any type of E-Postage or
Micropayments.
Instead, some combination of whie listing and digital signatures
represents a very efficient solution to this type of communications.
However, there is a second set of email exchages that I need to consider.
On occasion, I receive emails from "random" individuals with whom I don't
have any kind of pre-existing trust relationship.
While these exchanges are relatively infrequent, they often contain
important information.
Here, we require some form of additional solution that can be used to
screen the wheat from the chaff.
There are a wide variety of technical solutions that have been proposed
including:
(a) Challenge Response
(b) Micro-Payments
(c) Intelligent Filters.
Personally, I think that the Micro-Payment systems offer the best
approach.
This is technology that is going to be adopted / deployed anyway and I'd
just as soon piggyback off it.
Your arguments that the system would collapse under transaction volume
seem to assume that all emails would need to E-Postage rather than a
selective subset.
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