Re: Looking at the U in UBE

On Thu, 14 Apr 2005 02:01, [email protected] wrote:
> An email costs the sender $0.50 to be placed in the receiver's inbox (or,
> more strictly, for the sender to be notified of its presence).  When the
> recipient reads it, he/she decides whether it was wanted or not.  If so,
> $0.499 is refunded.  If not, the sender loses his/her 50 cents.  MUAs can
> allow recipients to configure a list of senders who are always refunded.

This is more or less what Vanquish proposes with their "Personal Value 
Control" engine (marketroid blah blah). It's explained, albeit not very well, 
at the following location and surrounding pages.

  http://vanquish.com/lab/lab_taking_control.shtml

I know about this because I met Phil Raymond, CEO of Vanquish, at last year's 
Conference on Email and Anti-Spam. It's like a challenge/response system, 
except that the challenge that the sender must meet is to place a bond with 
an escrow agent (Vanquish, in this case). Once the bond is in escrow, the 
delivery is completed. The recipient is given the option of taking the bond 
money, or releasing it. Typically the bond will be returned in full if the 
message is acceptable: the escrow agent makes money by charging the recipient 
for the service, not by taking a fraction of a cent from each sender.

So long as the problem of falsified sender identities can be solved, there's 
nothing drastically wrong with this approach, so long as you don't mind the 
fact that 99% of people who might have emailed you spontaneously will no 
longer do so, having been put off by the idea of getting their credit card 
involved in the process. On the other hand, if you're particularly famous, 
people might not be put off by the money side of things, but that's a special 
case.

Regards,
TFBW