Re: On the spam problem...

Hello Jacob;-)...

When all senders start paying all recipients for sending, you 
will be sending Internet Mail back to the days of TELEX 
settlement for directional differentials. 

Settlement is a very expensive business just to compute the 
differentials between regions, let alone on an individual 
pair-wise basis. 

The mere cost of the record keeping and bookkeeping will be 
far in excess of the value of sending anything. 

So, part of every MUA will then need to have a postage calculator 
to help the sender to evaluate whether to send each message 
to each recipient, and then need to keep a rigorous set of account 
books. 

Be careful about what you wish for...\Stef

Cheers...\Stef

At 4:49 +0100 2/2/04, Jacob Palme wrote:
>At 17.17 -0800 04-01-31, Fred Baker wrote:
>>I would say "yes", because there is not a uniform definition of spam, nor universal agreement that spam is bad. You think it is bad, and I think it is bad, but the guy sending it seems to disagree. I have been to the folks at my company that send spam (he bows his head sheepishly in absolute shame), and they tell me that the email they send is very closely targeted and resides within a vendor relationship, so that (for example) if I download a new driver for an aironet card from Cisco's site, it is *legally* accepted for them to send me occasional mail related to wireless networking. They are my vendor in some sense, and within that relationship the rules are different than the rules for people promoting v1@gr@.
>
>This is very important. Every sender, and every recipient,
>has his own defintion of spam. For 95 % of all mail, most
>people agree, but not for the rest. That is why spam
>filters never work 100 %.
>
>The only solution I see for this is to make senders pay
>a suitable chosen amount for sending mail to me. The amound
>should be so low, that no serious sender is stopped, but
>high enough to make it uneconomical to send spam to
>millions of recipients.
>
>Authetication and laws against certain obviously fraudulent
>practices will also help. Like intentional misspelling
>of spam words to get by spam filters.
>
>This solution will not stop all spam, some are willing to
>pay. Another problem is that it will stop mail which I do
>want to receive, such as mailing list messages. Therefore,
>I as a recipient must be able to say that I accept some
>mail, for example coming from mailing lists I subscribe to,
>even though the sender did not pay. It is the responsibility
>of the mailing list owner to keep spam out of a mailing
>list by only admitting messages within the charter of the
>list (not too strictly, of course, not dictatorship, just
>keeping the obvious spam out).
>-- 
>Jacob Palme <[email protected]> (Stockholm University and KTH)
>for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/