At 03:25 PM 2/12/97 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:

Having said this, the flaw remains that "junk mail" is "free" to the sender. This is a flaw in the ontology of e-mail, and needs to be fixed. Digital postage is one approach.

I decided long ago (okay, well, many months ago) that the "solution" is to invent a mechanism to allow spammers/advertisers to include a small amount of ecash as a gift with every spam. I figure that if USnail junk-mailers are willing to pay $0.32 for postage and probably $0.50 for production, printing, and labelling costs, all for no guarantees of results, they should even more happy to pay, say, 10 cents to each recipient. At that rate, an average person would probably receive enough "spam" to pay for his Internet account, quite analogous to the way advertiser-supported TV is presented to the public for no explicit charge. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com