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

2008-11-24 00:35:56
On Nov 23,  4:46pm, Al Iverson wrote:
}
} [Goodmail seems] to already have the whole per-message authenticated
} token thing worked out.. You buy the tokens, and once per message, a
} token is obtained from the token pool and applied to the message. That
} message gets special treatment at an ISP.

Yep.  Hence my earlier analogy of sump pumps versus rubber rafts.
Messages in Goodmail's raft float above the flood, but it doesn't
reduce the amount of water.  The same goes for SenderScoreCertified
and brandmailsolutions.com and all the other whitelisting schemes.
As long as it's cheaper to add rafts, no one will start pumping.

} Also, I don't see how any sort of "Pay for email system" as (yet
} again) described on an anti-spam mailing list solves the issue that
} we all have to buy into your system before it'll work.

I'm *almost* entirely with you on that.  Describing the payment
framework came about because of this bit of the thread:
http://www.irtf.org/pipermail/asrg/2008-November/003963.html
http://www.irtf.org/pipermail/asrg/2008-November/003969.html
http://www.irtf.org/pipermail/asrg/2008-November/003971.html

(Gerald's "objections" to Goodmail are at the end of that last one.)

I say "almost" because as soon as any two cooperating entities get
on board, they've gotten at least as far as Goodmail has: email
between those two entities can float above the flood.  A whole lot
more entities must be involved before the water starts to go down.

} And their system requires fewer fundamental changes to an ISP's
} backend than yours does.

Agreed again.  On the other hand, that whole thing falls apart if
Goodmail doesn't succeed, and either way -- unless Goodmail manages
to convince everyone to pay them and becomes the universal solution,
so anything not processed by Goodmail can be outright rejected --
at the end there's still just as much spam as ever.

The suggestion was to chop up the technical problem.  Assume how the
money (or whatever) moves around is a black box, and instead describe
how to attach to an email the information about who moves it and how
much.  OK, so I've described one way, and Gerald another.  Gerald
suggests a token pool like Goodmail's, but distributed among all the
recipients; everyone becomes their own little Goodmail, with an
auto-generated URL to contact the "imprinter" (to steal Goodmail's
name for it).  I like my suggestion because it doesn't need any
"token pool" at all.  End of that discussion unless somebody else is
interested.

Now somebody needs to explain how the economics work.  Pick whichever
framework you think is less burdensome and describe why you think an
ISP could extract enough value from it to actually bother building it.
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