-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- A million monkeys operating under the pseudonym "Toto <toto@sk.sympatico.ca>" typed:
I believe that the 'money-point' for UCE (unsolicited commercial email) spammers is somewhere around .02% for most of their offerings. In other words, they need to send out 10,000 emails and get a response just to break even.
Actually I had a talk with a certain anti-spam ISP owner recently, and she asserted that the spammers don't make significant money from responses to their spams, but are instead making their money from stupid newbie companies who pay them for advertising service. It's an interesting proposition. You would think, though, that the spamsters might as well just take the stupid newbie company's cash and then send a couple of token e-mail messages, if that's their business model. :-)
I truly believe that the InterNet should be left accessible to those without a lot of resources/cash, and that any effort to control abuse through cost should be so minimal as to not interfere with the ability of those who are currency-challenged to participate in its benefits.
I concur. Note that a variation on the "good faith deposit" idea is to make the included payment an actual, final _payment_. If it were small enough, it wouldn't really matter to the sender (especially since she would probably get a response back containing a similar payment). Still, in order to minimize the economic impact on non-commercial senders, I favor a deposit instead. (It can be implemented almost as efficiently as a final payment would...) Again I assert, though, that this "deposit" shall have no legal effect. The cost of possibly incurring legal liability far outweighs the amounts that we are dealing with, effectively killing the whole idea in its cradle. Regards, Zooko NOT speaking for DigiCash or any other person or organization. PGP sig follows -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2i Comment: Auto-signed under Unix with 'BAP' Easy-PGP v1.1b2 iQB1AwUBMzlS80jbHy8sKZitAQFW9AL9FdUfIdSQQUBrXkZMN0v3vkfgO6UzpmXI dBzC44flylyP6fmXiR/C32QaLaWbcZWZoPI1Q3gPmD8bVOvVV2C8623wKWAXnoUm r9h/0/rOC6YgHXKaiPNBOr2tlyDuJ3hx =Tw/j -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----