E-Mail Authentication Will Not End Spam, Panelists Say

[Russell Nelson]

R.A. Hettinga writes:
 > >mail, followed by email from strangers (which is where all the spam
 > >is).
 > 
 > A whitelist for my friends, all others pay...
 > 
 > oh, forget it.

Anybody can pay to send email right now.  You just go to paypal, type
in the person's email, enter the amount of money you think is
necessary to persuade them to read the email, and put the text of your
message in the comment box.  My email is paypal.com at russnelson.com;
feel free to send me as much email as you want, ca-ching!

But anyway, that's not what I propose.  I suggest that email from
strangers needs to come with an introducer of some sort to convince
you to read it.  There's a dozen different kind of introducers which
could be used, some of them using cryptography, only one or two of
which involve payment.  The days when all email was treated equally by
an email client are long past, or at least, should be if you're
running a decent email client.  Maybe the level of spam complaints is
caused by the low quality of email clients?

-- 
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