Re: On the spam problem...

At 15.29 -0800 04-02-04, 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.

I am aware of this problem. Another problem is that letting
senders pay will be difficult to handle for mailing lists,
where it is often more the recipient than the sender who
wishes to get the messages.

But in this mailing list we are meant to be open to new
ideas. So we could at least discuss the topic.

Exact bookeeping might be expensive. We are all waiting for
a working universal micropayment system, which would
benefit the Internet a lot, but does not seem to be
realized.

I was thinking of something like the following:

The sender pays something like 10 or 20 cents to the
recipient for hist costs of accepting the mail. This would
make spamming less economically advantageous. An exception
could be made for mailing list messages, where the
recipient can set up his mailer to accept unpaid messages
from those mailing lists which the user wants to receive.
But for this works, we need an efficient and really
low-cost micro payment system.
-- 
Jacob Palme <[email protected]> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/