If the delays remained entirely unexpected or random, quality would degrade. Humans, however, have an uncanny ability to modify their own behavior.
I disagree with your inferrence that quality would stay roughly the same.
From Tim May: (I am not getting list traffic right now, presumably due to the Netcom overload problem, and so am only seeing messages I am directly copied on. And maybe not all of them, either. [...]
This seems to indicate that Tim is currently having trouble taking part in much of the discussion that is currently not directed at him due to delays in email processing. Gosh, I wonder if that effects the quality of his Cypherpunks Experience(tm). Multiply that by a possible 25% (arbitrary) of the list being delayed andmy crystal ball says round after round of the same replies and comments from different people will filter in after the discussion of the original comment ceaces. This frustrates the readership who is trying to find the meat of the list as well as the senders (which, it should be noted, is the desired goal) by having thier material appear irrelevent due to being delayed. I'm worried about the reader, mostly, but then there are those who will be frusterated enough to leave, for example Tim. Or perhaps I am one of the few here who values Tim's comments to the list enough to think the list would loose something if he took off. And I'd wager that Tim isn't the only one who would leave. Perhaps your ability to filter the garbage from the treasure is truly uncanny, Eric, and all this wouldn't effect you. I don't think most of the rest of us are quite so amazing.
I am also willing to risk a small amount of degradation to encourage people to actually use encryption tools.
I guess this is the answer then. There we go.
Having notification that a message wasn't signed was never presented as one of the purposes of the proposal.
My mistake then, I thought you had proposed marking messages as unsigned as an intermediate step. Too hard to keep track of who is saying what in this particular thread. -j, preparing to start the Cypherpunks Postal List. After all, what's a little delay?
Eric