At 12:05 AM 6/19/96, Hal wrote:
I was reading old threads on remailers, where various ideas were suggested to reduce abuse. One was to charge postage, in order to discourage spam and somewhat discourage nastygrams, as well as to compensate the remailer operator for his risks. A variant was to tell the recipient that he had anonymous mail waiting, and possibly charge him to receive it.
I had a different idea, which has probably been suggested before: make the sender of the anonymous mail pay, but pass the money to the recipient.
An interesting variant; I would certainly like to see _any_ of the various digital postage ideas tried. Alas, none have (save for Sameer's option for charging for remailings). However, I can see some problems which I think would arise with Hal's "recipient gets postage" scheme. * in an ecology of several types of remailers, some not charging postage, some charging postage (with subcategories of some giving the postage to the recipient and some keeping the postage for themselves), who would use the postage variant? (This is a recurring situation where some services are free and some are not. I fully realize that some paid services prosper (duh!, as we still have thriving economies) even where free alternatives exist. That the various newspapers continue to sell, or that premium t.v. channels on cable thrive, when "free" alternatives exist is just one example. How paid remailers would compete with free remailers is a topic we've written much about.) * the "cost" of remailing is not borne by the recipient, in the current situation, so why should a "remailer gets postage" system have advantages? * a recipient may "demand" payment for remailed messages, e.g., by adopting a policy of saying "Unless I find 37 digicents per 10KB of size, I will dump the message...so if you want to reach me, pay me." This "works" by the simple expedient of being a demand that is adhered to. (In this case, the recipient of a message is "selling" a commodity: access to him. The senders of messages can either accept his terms or reject them.) [Note: Current e-mail systems are not very market-based. Metering is almost nonexistent, and it's as if anyone could mail a ton or two of horse manure to anyone for no cost. I expect this to eventually change, and one way it could change is for mail clients to refuse to accept delivery unless certain conditions were met (who the sender is, how much payment is attached, etc.). The ontology of physical package and mail delivery systems has some lessons, though not all translate easily into the Internet domain.] * but it seems to make little sense for a remailer, absent such a demanded price, to give up his postage fee to a recipient! I'm not saying such a system could not work, only that I would not expect a free market ecology of remailers to evolve this as a stable evolutionary strategy. I would expect a more likely future stable strategy to include some combination of payments demanded by remailers and some payment or the like demanded by terminal recipients.
All my complaints come from people who have received mail, never from people who have sent it. So obviously the steps we take need to make recipients happier. Paying them is one way to do it.
Not to be flippant, but the job of making recipients happier is probably not ours. We don't know whether a digital dime will make them happier for receiving a threat, or a flame, or a 10 MB coredump file. This is why it is up to the recipient to set policies, prices, etc. (Ditto for the remailers, as only they know how much it is worth to them to remail a given message, depending on packet size, perceived risk to them, etc.) Again, I always enjoy gedankenexperiments about digital postage. But I am chagrinned that nearly four years after the first remailers we are still operating in thought experiment mode for the most part. I believe this is because there really is very little market at this time for anonymous remailings. Those who mostly use remailers appear to be willing to use casual-grade remailers, with few of the real Chaumian protections. And they are not very concerned about reliablity, cover traffic, etc. Digital postage would be a bothersome wrinkle and would be routed-around by most. Ergo, no commercial-grade remailers, no insistence on robustness and reliability, no digital postage, and no interest by Microsoft! --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."