Re: Looking at the U in UBE

>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.

So we'd still get spam, just better-targeted spam selling higher-end
products?  That's worth charging *everyone* to exchange email
messages?

Consider this.  Do people use email to transact business,
e.g. negotiate prices in exchange for goods and services?

Answer: yes.  And, normally, any communications system used for such
negotiations is *not*, itself, designed to require up-front payment,
or promise of payment, in order to engage in such communications.

(Either or both parties might pay a third party to intermediate and/or
enable the communications.  That's not like email; that's more like
the telephone system, or an airline.)

Generally, when system A depends upon system B to operate properly, it
is unwise to contemplate "improving" system B to depend on system A in
order to operate properly.

So, since markets are increasingly depending upon email (mainly,
two-party email) to transact business, it would be unwise to try to
make using email depend upon engaging in business transactions (which
is what any pay-by-email system basically implies).

After all, how would these financial promises, payments, etc. be
transacted, if not via email?  By some *other* communications system?

And how do we keep *that* system from being targeted by spammers out
to wreck the system, if they can't use it directly for spam?

And why can't we apply *those* solutions more directly to the problem
of making *free* email work better?

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

Yet, here we all are, still using it, and it seems to be working
pretty well.

One way to test whether charging for sending email works: set up a
service whereby subscribers pay to submit their email via the
service's SMTP server (presumably using SMTP AUTH or SMTP-after-POP3
or similar).

Then, see how popular the scheme is, how much of the Internet you can
convince to whitelist your entire server as a relay, etc.  (The
financial arrangements might be a bit more complicated than that, but
you get the picture.)

It's cruder than most proposals involving charging for email, but most
such systems start out similarly crudely, letting the market decide
whether fine-grained controls are really necessary only after it
decides whether the *concept* will fly.

-- 
James Craig Burley
Software Craftsperson
<http://www.jcb-sc.com>