On Tuesday, May 20, 2003, at 01:22 AM, Bill Stewart wrote:
I'm forwarding this just because it's the first time I've seen a commercial spam-blocker program that implements sender-pays, so it seemed topical. I don't know if any of their customers have actually implemented that feature (it's got other alternatives like a Bayesian filter and Turing auto-responder) or if anybody has actually bothered to send them mail if they use it.
(Their email for it looks like semi-spammy drivel, but they've got permission, because I was once interested in getting updates about one of their other packages and haven't bothered unsubscribing.)
Trivially uninteresting, because of the "fax effect." Until the overwhelming percentage of those I really need to get through to me have started using such a system, too many messages lost. Which is a side effect of the important fact that currency varies from person to person. There is no fixed value of either money or access. As a data point, subject to change, nobody I really care to communicate with at this time either has (to the best of my knowledge) a PayPal account nor is hep to the idea of spending a few hours trying to learn how to pay to send me messages. Perhaps they know that I neither have a PayPal account nor will spend the time to figure out how to receive their paid messages. Q.E.D. --Tim May