Re: Looking at the U in UBE

[ Incidentally, The Famous Brett Watson send me this link which was interesting:
http://vanquish.com/ I don't recall whether he copied the list ]

Quoting Casey Allen Shobe <[email protected]>:


> Any of these money-based approaches I've heard scare me, and not just a
> little.

Don't be scared!  It'll be alright *pats on back*

> I have 45,000 emails in this account - you propose that people would have had
> to invest a total of $450.00 in me to let me read them, at risk of paying a
> lot more?

How long did it take you to accumulate these mails?  How many senders?  In
short, yes.  The longer answer is I feel there's a way in to this situation by
starting it up between corporations who have partnerships.  Warranted
communication between employees in key roles.  It would be good to come up with
a scalable distributed infrastructure that could work its way in that thru that
niche and slowly grow as more people want to communicate with those
organisations.  Later, only AOLers and spammers would use the old style email.

Come to think of it, it could start out as a simple addition to SMTP - return an
error that a guarantor is required.  Hmmm...

> You're posting to a mailing list, but you seem to forget mailing lists in
> your approach?

Hmm, yes.  The "fine" part holds good, but the "creaming off" part for the ISP
falls down a bit.  Looking at only the fine part for now, yes, it's a single
recipient from my point of view.  The mailing list owner/sponsor has to carry
the risk of recipients not liking the mail.  This leads to responsible,
hands-on administration of mailing lists.

> If the mailing list has 2000 subscribers, there's no way anyone
> will pay $20 to send a single email, plus the risk of some people saying it's
> not wanted.

Point taken.  I hadn't thought through the charging part, the main idea was the
fine part but then I realised someone whould have to administer the
infrastructure.  I'm starting to lean towards a flexible charging scheme that
accumulates with each hop.  The sender can set thresholds at which the delivery
will instantly be cancelled, and MTAs can set their own wanted and unwanted
charges.

> $0.50 may be a lot to you for an unwanted mail, but it's nothing to the
> people who make money off of sending them out.

Here I disagree.  As I understand it, spam is cost effective only because it is
*SO* cheap to send junk mail.  At $0.50 you might still get junk mail, but it
would be more carefully targeted, resulting in less traffic and a better
operational internet.

> E-Mail is free and should always be free.  Any system that is not will never
> succeed.

That's simply an emotional response, the first part of which I share, but I
believe while it remains free it is in the grip of entropy and is destined to
become the CB-radio of the 2010s.

You might as well say everybody on the internet should know each other
personally like back in the days of the ARPANET.

If there's a single reason email needs replacing it's because of spam.

If there's a single reason for the existence of spam it's because it's
effectively free to send.

That's all I have time for right now.  But as per my original post on this
subject, it all rather depends on identity guarantees.

Steve.