At 01:46 AM 9/6/96 -0400, Donald E. Eastlake 3rd wrote:

Suggest you look at draft-eastlake-internet-payment-*.txt in the IETF shadow directories. I don't think any one step will solve all our spam problems but I wouldn't mind spending, say, 5 cents for each real piece of mail I sent outside my company and if end machines charged 5 cents per piece of ouside mail received, I think spamming would be crippled. (Note that with bad guy lists, you could collect the money and then just throw away the mail.)

Assuming we all agree that we're moving from a paper-based mail system to email, it is logical that "junk mail" will move as well. As I recall, statistics show that the average cost of a piece of junk mail is about $1 or so, including postage, printing, etc. It occurred to me a while back (and this proposal appears to be at least approximated by other proposals around here) that since companies are already saving a dollar, they should use some of those savings to "bribe" Internet-users into reading those (commercial) messages. Don't bother with all the details on how to verify this, just include digital cash along with the message, to be credited automatically to the recipient. Assuming the average Internet user already pays about $15 per month for access, he would only have to receive 2 emails a day which pay him 25 cents per, to pay for this service. At that point, his Internet access would be free, at least somewhat analogous to free TV which is paid for by commercials. Everybody's ahead, except for the postman, the printer, etc. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com