On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Jan Meijer wrote:
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 10:26:33 +0200 (W. Europe Daylight Time)
From: Jan Meijer <Jan(_dot_)Meijer(_at_)surfnet(_dot_)nl>
To: Rick Wesson <wessorh(_at_)ar(_dot_)com>
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org, rick(_at_)ar(_dot_)com
Subject: Re: on UCE: Possible Interest (fwd)
Its time for postage stamps for email.
That makes email expensive for all, whereas we want to make it expensive
for spammers. On a more practical note: what amount should be charged and
The cost is be set by the recipient. They maintain a white list of
people / mailing lists that can send them mail without charge. They get
to choose whether to trust the From address or require mail to be
digitally signed to qualify for white list treatment or allow free mail
if a special password header is present or whatever. Almost all mailing
lists would refuse to pay so if you don't set them up on your white
list, you won't get mail from them. Spam is unsolicited and won't match
anyone on the whitelist and bulk so it will be too expensive for the
spammer. All this is obvious.
And its fairly simple from a protocol point of view but enormously
difficult in terms of deployment, payment infrastructure, etc. In fact,
a hash token scheme where you pay in computrons and which would be less
effective but avoids the payment infrastructure problems is probably a
necessary step on the way to such a final system.
how will you explain the charge to people when they know that email is not
that costly.
One word: "spam".
Jan
Donald