From: Peter Hendrickson on Thu, Nov 14, 1996 13:22
This assumes that spam has gotten so bad that everybody filters their mail and only accepts mail on the "accept" list. People sending mail directly to your account would get a message back saying that they had to get on the "free" list or send their mail through one of the approved remailers.
So our ideas on implementation are similar, except you have made the distinction that anyone on the "free" list can have direct access. Unfortunately, your idea pivots on the idea spam has exploded to unbearable proportions. My complaint on this isn't your idea, it's the projection such an event may occur. While I hope this plan won't ever be necessary, at least not on such a global scale, the application of such techniques toward a mailing list sounds decent. I'm still thinking about how I would go about charging WRT mailing lists; anonymous postings are puzzling me at the moment. Which brings up another topic: How would an anonymous remailer operate? It's hard to eliminate an audit trail when there is some monetary tie back to you, whether it be credit card, ecash (assuming they never quite figure out anonymizing it), ... PM