Re: [Asrg] The fundamental misconception about paying for mail

>  If senders of e-mail had to pay fairly for the resources they use
>  then there would be no e-mail as we know it today.
Really? Bandwidth and disk space are cheap. If it cost me a penny to  
send each e-mail, I don't see that it would make any difference to how  
much e-mail I sent. You could probably even increase the price to 5¢  
per message and I wouldn't blink. How much e-mail do you think the  
average person sends, and do you have any sources to back up your  
estimate?
> We receivers cheerfully give the legit senders a free ride because we
> find their mail worth reading.
No, we give them a free ride because the incremental cost of each  
message we receive is so close to zero as to be effectively zero.
I'm signed up for a dozen or more commercial promotional mailing lists  
from companies I do business with, because it costs me nothing to  
receive the additional e-mail, and I can auto-filter it into a folder  
because they're known senders. However, SMS messages cost me actual  
money to receive, so in spite of all the useful services available via  
SMS, there are exactly zero companies I have authorized to send me  
messages via that mechanism.
> [...] that would still kill vast amounts of mail that
> people want, such as this very mailing list.
Only if you assume a system where everybody is required to pay all the  
time, which is a ridiculous strawman. There's no technical reason why  
I should not be able to simply whitelist traffic from this list to be  
delivered for free.
Even if the hypothetical system was so dumb that it required everyone  
to pay to send e-mail all the time, a lot of things that used to be  
handled as e-mail are handled as web feeds now, and this list could  
easily be one of them.
> How would we keep from killing all the mail we want?  The only method
> anyone has ever proposed is for the recipients to skip charging
> settlements to senders they like.  But once you know who you wouldn't
> charge, you don't need the charges, you just whitelist the ones you
> wouldn't have charged and filter the rest.
Indeed. If your list of correspondents is fixed, whitelisting is a  
perfect solution.
>  You'd still need some way
> to get new senders into your whitelist, but the complete failure of
> systems like Vanquish offers no reason to expect that charging is the
> way to do it.
I'm more inclined to believe that the failure of Vanquish is due to  
the fact that (a) it's $40 a year, and (b) it's so obscure that (for  
example) I hadn't heard of it.
> PS: If I seem a bit crabby about this, perhaps it is because I have
> spent considerable time researching the way that proposed micropayment
> systems work, researching the cost models for e-mail, telephone calls,
> paper mail, and other messaging systems, and trying to build models
> for the way filtering and charging might work and how they might or
> might not scale and how they might be subverted by hostile parties.
Has this research been published?


Going back to whitelisting...

What's effectively happening these days, in my experience, is that  
we're ending up with a solution consisting of whitelisting plus  
introductions, where the cost of introduction is signing up to one or  
more social networking websites. And commercial traffic is moving out  
of e-mail entirely, towards web feeds.
This seems to match the research I've seen, that suggests that younger  
people consider e-mail to be something that old people use, and they  
don't see any use for it; they just use the messaging services of the  
social networking sites.
And of course, a lot of the commercial traffic is moving towards the  
social networking sites too. Where, strangely enough, it seems not to  
be impossible to charge commercial senders small fees per message.

mathew

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