On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 09:06:18AM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
OTOH, I still think a micro-payment postage system is a better idea. The sender puts a micro-payment into the mail header to pay the recipient to accept/read the message. For non-spam, the receipient doesn't need to cash the payment (or can just return it to the sander). For spam, the receipient collects the money (thereby costing the spammer real $$$ to send spam, if most receipients actually collect). The only remaining architectural problem is how to handle mailing lits.
If we assume an environment where a payor/spender can later check to see if their payment was cashed, this also creates a relatively cheap way for spammers to create or validate a list of working email addresses. Hash-based lists of spam messages have this property, too - a recipient of a unique message implicitly validates their email address by reporting the message or its hash to a public database of known spams, if the sender of the message cares to go back and check to see which of their sent messages have been reported. Exploits of those features may be a few steps down the road in the spam arms race, but it's not unthinkable ... -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@parrhesia.com