Re: [Asrg] Spam, defined, and permissions

Remove the economic incentives, and I might structure this slightly
differently but whatever, and you end up right where we are right now.

My view is that without introducing economics into the picture we're
all just hoping someone comes along and expends enormous time and
energy and resources etc to fix the problem.


On December 29, 2004 at 10:54 jlick(_at_)drivel(_dot_)com (James Lick) wrote:
> I'm not sure I understand something completely...
>
> In order for a paid postage system to work, ISPs would need to 
> block/control all mail transactions on their network.  The logical way 
> to do this is to block port 25 and monitor and rate limit transactions 
> through the authorized servers.
>
> But it seems to me that just blocking port 25 and monitoring and rate 
> limiting transactions through the authorized servers solves at least 90% 
> of the problem without charging anyone anything.  If the outgoing mail 
> servers all had anti-virus scanning too, you'd make it very difficult to 
> spread viruses effectively too.  Adding smtp-auth on top would make it 
> more difficult still.  And instead of fining those that are spewing 
> viruses, you could just count each failed virus sent as an email attempt 
> and cut off their email at something like 500 messages as going over 
> their quota.  That gives the users an incentive to clean up, while still 
> allowing the ISP a content-neutral mechanism for cutting off the bad apples.
>
> So why aren't the advocates of email postage at least recommending this 
> as a first step?
>
> (Just to be clear, I would only advocate mandatory port 25 blocking on 
> consumer-level accounts.)
>
> -- 
> James Lick --