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Re: [Asrg] Email Postage (was Re: FeedBack loops)

2008-11-14 19:46:07
In that header is a cryptographically secure string which is the
postage which was purchased from a recognized issuance party. Think,
as an analogy, SSL certificates.

A site could choose to accept or reject such "stamped" email.

Monies collected for such postage could be divided up, I won't belabor
this detail.

Gee, you stop just when you're getting to the insoluble problems.

Look, we know how to build small closed e-mail systems that charge per
message.  MCI Mail did OK for a while until the Internet made it
irrelevant.  What we don't know is how to scale it up to anything like
the size of the Internet mail system, nor how to do settlements among
the huge numbers of mail systems that exist.

To pick an obvious and well-known hard problem, how do you plan to
prevent double spending of your stamps, and make your solution scale
up to an interestingly large amount of mail?  I know you think I'm
just being defeatist, but handwaving has never been much of a
substitute for engineering, and the engineering problems in metering
large volumes of anything are hard.

Spam is particularly hard, since no payment system I know of, micro or
otherwise, has been designed for an environment where 95% of the
putative payments are bogus.

R's,
John
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