Re: Why Spam is a problem

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 07:57:26 PDT, David Morris <dwm(_at_)xpasc(_dot_)com>  said:

> Based on this technical infrastructure, I would envision I would configure
> my 'free' server to only accept mail from authenticated sources such as
> the IETF, W3C, or perhaps specific sources by address.
Guess I'd have to post to the IETF list in order for you to get any comments
I might have about your proposal, if your proposal was in effect.  That's
assuming I'd bother commenting at all - in the last 60 days, I've sent 544
pieces of e-mail.  At $0.20 a pop, that's $60/month I'm certainly not going
to pay out of MY pocket, nor is my employer likely to pick up the tab for.

And of course, my mail server wouldn't be configured to accept from you,
since I wouldn't have whitelisted you either.

So I end up having to spam the list in order to get around the anti-spam
restriction you have - what's wrong with this picture?

There's also the problem that there's no good micropayment system out there
at the moment - how am I to remit you the $0.20? Remember that it's going
to get *pounded* on - a recent stat said that MSN and Hotmail were seeing
2 billion pieces of e-mail a day, and 80% of it was spam.  This however leaves
some 400 million non-spam a day - which will turn into 400 million hits per
day on your hypothetical micropayment server (come ON, you don't expect any
of the large services like AOL or MSN or Yahoo to whitelist people and turn off
a potential revenue source, do you? ;)

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how we'll manage
the "specific sources by address" list for 50K or 100K mailboxes in our
user community.

Other than those showstopper issues, it sounds like a great idea. ;)
-- 
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Computer Systems Senior Engineer
                                Virginia Tech

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