-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- 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. 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. Of course there are lots of details: how much should be charged, will recipients really be so thrilled when a "fuck you" note has a nickel wrapped in it, how will they cash their checks, etc. If ecash were used this might be a motivation for people to open an account. Nym servers could be funded by the nym owners to pay for a certain number of messages. Since the nym owner ends up receiving the cash it doesn't actually cost him anything and he can easily afford to keep a pool of cash in the nym server to keep the messages coming through. Remailers which wanted to apply this rule would have to deposit the money and immediately withdraw the same amount to include in the outgoing mail. Users would basically have to trust the remailers to do this honestly. Maybe it only needs to be done when the mail goes to a non-remail end user destination, not for the intermediate links in the chain. Postings to newgroups and mailing lists would make the cash available to the first one who grabs it. It can be a fun game; we've done it here occasionally. This might also motivate people to sign up for ecash. Just a thought - Hal -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQBVAwUBMcdENBnMLJtOy9MBAQFbpAH+NCq3HMN4+ar6UVWBFxvhAQ2OCu+EehX7 CgnLButTRJEM4OdOEsBaLzYBdi5bk0acelSpE/Zqj1S46bD2UQt50w== =2NAN -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----