At 3:12 PM 11/14/1996, Mullen Patrick wrote:

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.

People complain all the time about advertising spam. People have been maliciously spamming other people since the beginning of time. (The epoch here is the birth of the Net.) The problem has arrived. Right now it is merely irritating, but we have already seen calls for more control and more legislation. In my view, that would be a disaster. Let's head it off at the pass.

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.

This may sound like a quibble, but it really isn't: I am not talking about a global scale at all. A very small group of people can make use of this technology successfully. It doesn't matter whether everybody in the world uses it or just people who are tired of spam - it still works. You only need one remailer operator to do this and it will be fully available.

I'm still thinking about how I would go about charging WRT mailing lists; anonymous postings are puzzling me at the moment.

I was probably a little quick on the keys. Charging to send to a mailing list does not solve the spam problem. Why? Because it is worth a dollar to send an advertisement to 3000 people. What it does do is cut down on "me too" posts and encourage people to make the best use of the bandwidth they are paying for. It would be easy for a remailer operator to do this if mail were accepted only from the "paying" remailer. However, if you restrict postings to an approved group of people, perhaps everybody on the mailing list, you can eliminate spam. How, then, do we allow anonymous postings to come through? Individual people on the list can receive the proposed post and forward it to the list if it is appropriate. They could even charge a fee for doing it. That's easy to do if there is a "paying" remailer which will handle the money for them.

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), ...

I assumed untraceable cash transactions for small amounts were available. E-cash, the product licensed by Digicash, offers full payee anonymity and would be an ideal candidate. Peter Hendrickson ph@netcom.com