On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 13:14, der Mouse
<mouse(_at_)rodents-montreal(_dot_)org> wrote:
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.
Who's this "we"? The cost of a received email to me is substantially
greater than zero. Even the ones that are delete-on-sight cost me at
least a few seconds of my time.
I was talking about financial cost, as I thought was obvious.
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.
Except that that leaves you wide open to spam forged to appear to be
from the list - or even sent through the list.
Spammers could bypass all my spam filtering right now, and probably that of
many other people, if they could reliably automatically guess what mailing
lists their victims are on. Has anyone seen any evidence that they are
capable of doing so?
Mailing lists might need to implement S/MIME to avoid such a problem.
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.
This sounds like "what's more, it doesn't matter if it _does_ kill off
email, because there are other things taking over from email anyway".
Spam is the thing that's killing off e-mail. Stuff that used to be handled
as e-mail is increasingly being handled as web feeds, whether or not a
pay-to-send model is implemented for e-mail. The fact that some things might
need to move out of e-mail if pay-to-send were implemented, is not a valid
reason to object to pay-to-send if those things were already moving out of
e-mail anyway.
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.
Well, sure. They have a "post office", in that all communication goes
through a central clearinghouse organization. It works fine, at small
scales and with many such clearinghouses.
I was commenting on the "it's economically infeasible to charge small
per-message charges" argument that was put forth on this list recently.
mathew
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