Re: On the spam problem...

On 5-feb-04, at 0:29, Einar Stefferud wrote:

> 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.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

On the other hand, I think it would be a good idea to set up the new 
system such that adding something like this would be easy to do. So the 
actual payment stuff wouldn't be in there, but there would be a 
mechanism that allows B to say to A "I won't accept this message 
because you don't support additional capability X. For alternative ways 
to reach me, see Y."

The user-level requirement would be that I don't want email to fail in 
a way that's invisible to me, or through the use of cryptic bounce 
messages. (Which is a huge annoyance at the moment because opening my 
mailbox over GPRS costs me a fortune and takes forever due to all the 
bounced fakes with the worm attachments in it.) When mail delivery 
fails I need to know what I can do to get in touch with the recipient 
through mail or otherwise.