A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

Derek Atkins derek at ihtfp.com
Tue May 13 06:06:18 PDT 2003


"Paul Walker" <paul at black-sun.demon.co.uk> writes:

> > I submit that if Joe Lunchbox is not spamming, he is unlikely to
> > need to change his habits regarding having his machine available
> 
> Mostly unrelated to this, but something's just occurred to me. Probably I'm
> being really stupid, but ... for the receiving MTA to know that the problem
> has been processed properly, it would have to know the answer. How does it
> know what the answer should be?

The same way you know you have the right answer with certain other
hard problems -- you choose a problem that's one-way hard.  For
example: factoring.  Factoring a large number is hard.  Verifying you
have the right answer is easy (you just multiply the factors and see
if you've got the right answer).  So, just choose from the class of
self-verifying problems.

OTOH, I still think a micro-payment postage system is a better idea.
The sender puts a micro-payment into the mail header to pay the
recipient to accept/read the message.  For non-spam, the receipient
doesn't need to cash the payment (or can just return it to the
sander).  For spam, the receipient collects the money (thereby costing
the spammer real $$$ to send spam, if most receipients actually
collect).  The only remaining architectural problem is how to handle
mailing lits.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com

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