bulk postage fine (was Re: non-censorous spam control)

[sar]

At 06:32 AM 8/3/97 +1000, ? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
>On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, Adam Back wrote:
>
>> Next we choose a threshold say 1000 posts per day.  Seems hard to
>> imagine anyone generating manually over 1000 emails per day.  That's
>> more than 1 per minute for a 10 hour day.
>
>I bet this mailing list generates traffic of that order.  I would not wish
>to see legitimite mailing lists shut down to stop the spam.
>
>The best soultion given so far is Cause's suggestion of modifying the fax
>law so that we can sue the spammers.
>
Take bugtraq which has over 12,000 subscribers. Each post to bugtraq would
send out 12,000 emails so it would cost aleph one 1200$ per post to his
list. I dont think anyone would want to run a mailing list under these
sorts of conditions. Or say you run a normaly small mailing list with only
a few subscribers. One evil person could send just a few hundred emails to
you cost you money. The same goes for anon emails. Anyone not wanting to
take the chance of ending up spending $100 or more at the whim of any 14
year old with a copy of upyours or not wanting to have to pay for providing
a free public service would simply give up and shut down his mailinglist.