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

2008-11-29 19:47:41

On Nov 29, 2008, at 4:31 PM, John Levine wrote:

There are 650 recipients on this mailing list. Are you willing to pay $32.50 for each message you send to it? If not, do you think someone
else should pay?  Who should it be?

I assume that people who wanted to receive mail from non-commercial
mailing lists like this one would need to agree to receive it without
payment.

Now wait a minute.  A day ago someone purporting to be you said that
even at a nickel a message the cost would be trivial:

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 5c per message and I wouldn't blink.

Now we find that outgoing mail is so expensive that you want special
rules to avoid paying for some of it.  Better make up your mind -- is
your mail stream too cheap to care about or not?  For that matter, if
people are willing to waive the fee for mail from the IRTF, why
wouldn't they waive the fee on every list they sign up for, commercial
or otherwise?  After all, they get all that mail without being paid
now.

Finally, if we'd still need special handling to whitelist the mail we
think is nice, what problem would a vast e-postage system be solving?

Wanted mail from strangers. This is *the* hard thing to handle, and while I don't think a vast e-postage scheme will be of much help, I've not seen
much else that looks any better.

Cheers,
  Steve

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