At 09:23 PM 2/12/97 -0800, jim bell wrote: ...

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.

First of all, they don't spend 32 cents per post. They get one of those bulk-mail permits which allows them to send those at a significant savings. The whole package complete with the cheap "Yes, I'll try your service, and send me the free gizmo"/"No, I don't need any more services, but I could use the free gizmo" stickers probably costs well within 50 cents. TV is not a gift per say, though your origional posts, involving a cookie, suggested something closer to TV. Currently, advertiser subsidized services, like hotmail, Yahoo, and similair, are closer in that you get the gift with only the minor distraction of the advertisement. A more functional system might be to include a cryptographic "key" of only a few bytes in the e-mail post that opens some online service of relative value. Along the lines of a hidden, no URL FTP site with all the best downloads. This would not be dependant upon e-cash being in place. Would require that the customer read at least part of the message in order to get the instructions on how to use the key. Prevent the user from just handing out the key to whoever asked as it would probably have a limited lifespan. And give the sender some location from which to conduct polling, headcounts, etc.