what they use somehow would no doubt slow them down a lot, let's try
to work it out a little and see where it goes".
Been there, done that, wrote the white paper. Really, I'm not
sceptical of pay-to-spam because I haven't thought about it, I'm
sceptical because I HAVE thought about it.
Or maybe we should just admit that the purpose of this group is to try
to figure out how to control a limited resource (i.e., people's
ability to deal with their email) that does not involve any sort of
resource charges whatsoever as a given.
That seems like a reasonable idea. The most interesting charging
systems in recent years are Vanquish, which had refundable payments,
and Goodmail, which is approximately paying for better delivery of
bulk mail that would probably have been delivered anyway.
Both are closed systems. There was never any spam inside the Vanquish
system, because the kind of people who'd sign up for it aren't the
kind who'd send spam. (Spammers, after all, are defined by their
desire to avoid paying for stuff.)
Goodmail does what it does perfectly well, but again it's a closed
system with its own channels into the ISPs that it works with, and
it's not much of a model for scaling up to the entire Internet. They
offer stuff that is of great interest to online marketers, e.g., web
mail systems displaying the graphics in their mail, and pretty
uninteresting to the rest of us.
On the other hand, there's plenty of non-financial incentives that we
could use to beat up on spammers. Everyone talks about reputation
systems, but there are precious few other than DNSBLs implemented, and
they don't suffer from any of the inherent scaling problems that
postage systems have.
R's,
John
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