A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

[Joseph Ashwood]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Derek Atkins" <derek at ihtfp.com>
Subject:  Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?



> 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.

So you're expecting that everyone will be honest about cashing
micropayments? That seems rather silly, if such a mechanism were to become
required on the internet I'd simply retire today, sign my email accounts
(all except 1) up on every spam list, every mailing list, everything that
would get me thousands of tokens a day, have an automated script cash all
the tokens for me, and I'm generally considered fairly scrupulous.
Additionally there is one major flaw in your design, what's to stop the
spammers from using fake micropayments? The fact that people who believe it
is spam will be unable to cash them? Like they really care about the people
who delete their email. Or were you planning on every intermediate mail
forwarder (all 14 of them between your sending and my recieving on this
list) taking the time out of their busy schedule to verify the
micropayments.

It won't work, the micropayment will be widely reused anyway, the spammers
depending on the bulk of the sends reaching their targets before the
micropayment is cashed. This will in turn increase the burden on the
intermediate servers; because the spammers obviously have to send out far
more now (because so many of their messages never reach the servers), and
the servers need to verify the payments (otherwise the payments mean
nothing). The entire solution only raises the backlog of spam, raises the
requirements for intermediate servers, raises the requriements for end
servers, and introduces new methods of mass abuse. Doesn't exactly sound
like something I want sitting on my network.
                    Joe