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

On 2008-11-20 19:12:17 -0500, Barry Shein wrote:

That aside let's try an example.

Say we could effectively impose a 1c/million messages cost (I'm using
US dollars because I might need to buy raw petroleum with the income
stream :-)

And, further, call any charge in a 24 hour period of less than 1c
equal to zero.

So, the O(billion) spammer would be in for $1,000/day.


1000 cents per day, or 10 Dollars per day.

But let's assume we charge 1c/10k messages/day. A spammer who sends out
1 billion messages per day probably has access to a botnet of at least
100k nodes. Which means that each zombie has to send out less than 10k
messages per day. Which it can do without incurring any cost to owner of
the 0wned machine. And even if a bot occassionally exceeds that limit,
how many users will even notice if their ISP charges them a few cents
more per month, much less clean up their PC?

Why would someone like Amazon agree to be charged say $300K/year?

They would if they believed it drastically lowered the spam, suddenly
their email might get read instead of drowned out in the deluge.


Amazon's mail is simple to recognize and frequent enough to configure a
filter for it. If people want to read it, they will. If people want to
ignore it, they will even if it's the only thing in their inbox on that
day.

Obviously how to get there is non-trivial.


Indeed. It's a chicken and egg problem. Amazon won't pay for postage
until they see an advantage in doing so. And receivers won't reject
mails without poststamps (not even score them down) until a significant
proportion of (legitimate) senders stamps their emails. 

You either need a marketing genius who can persuade everyone to convert
to the new system at once, or you need to offer an advantage to the
early adopters, so that the new system can grow incrementally. I won't
speculate about the former, but I don't see the latter. It won't
decrease spam unless widely adopted, so there is no gain, only cost. 

        hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | Openmoko has already embedded
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