A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

[Declan McCullagh]

At 09:57 AM 5/14/2003 -0400, Sunder wrote:
>Yes, but how will you stop the spammer from double spending the same $0.25
>micropayment on all of his 170,000 email addresses?  Depending on whether
>you check that there is a payment attached or not, and also check it with
>the bank before delivering it, you'd have already wasted your bandwith and
>possibly have accepted a spam into your mail spool.

It is true that the notions of micropayments as applied to spam (that I'm 
familiar with, at least) would require that the email recipient check with 
the bank to detect doublespending. This would introduce an additional delay 
before delivery from unknown senders, yes, but I fail to see how it would 
impose an unacceptable cost in bandwidth or CPU usage.

Spammers could still try the same-micropayment-a-million-times route, just 
as they could try to spam without micropayments, but if their email is 
rejected in sufficient quantities, the cost to the spammer would outweigh 
the benefits. The key is achieving sufficient quantities.

-Declan