Subject: [Asrg] E-postage/hashcash - the future

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 09:53:49 +1100

Written purely from the perspective of a lame user

From my way of thinking any form of payment ( monetary or value ) that is
imposed on email will eliminate most spam as it exists today.

I guess everyone realises that spam today is purely driven by the fact that
email is virtually free and a lot of email messages can be sent over a very
small period of time with little or no consequence to the sender.  The
premise has always been that a spammer only needs a very small response
rate to make the exercise profitable.

With that said, then a 'pay for email' system must work, right?  Well I
think it will but think a bit further into the future.

Once a 'pay for email' system in invoked does the payment therefore invoke
some responsibility on the payee for the email to be delivered?  I think
that in a legal sense that it does.  What we will see then is spam email
from legitimate sources.  Once large corporations realise that they have to
pay for email it will give them a sense of legitimacy and they will spam us
all.  Just like they do with the junk mail you get in your letter boxes
today.

So instead of an in box full of Vi@gra and medication messages, we will
start to receive emails from our discount stores, banks, etc,etc

Good thing?  Don't know for now.

John

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 11:33:01 +1100

>Hmmn.  I think you need to keep my note about the water powered car in
>mind.  GM has multi-billion dollar R&D resources.  Why haven't they
>built a water powered car?  Well, that's pretty much why we're not going
>to build an e-postage system.

>Regards,
>John Levine, [email-masked], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
>http://www.taugh.com
>

Well, it is interesting that you seem to  _know_  that GM hasn't already
built a water powered car LOL

In any case, I do see your point, but was just trying to express my opinion
as to what I think will happen if email is chargeable

John

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From: JC Dill <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 18:35:24 -0700

>as to what I think will happen if email is chargeable

It's about as useful as expressing an opinion as to what will happen when 
cars run on water.

You have to look at the obstacles to making it happen.  Thinking about how 
nice it will be "when it happens" is a waste of time if it ain't never 
gonna happen.

The first obstacle to making it happen is getting the first 1/2 of the mail 
clients/servers on the 'net to sign-on to whatever plan we propose and 
implementing the necessary changes first, before there is any hope of 
payoff.  The second obstacle is getting end users to agree to cut-off the 
last 1/2 of the mail clients/servers on the 'net (including aunt Sally with 
her old win95 box that can't be upgraded to a newer message system) once 
"critical mass" has been achieved, to force all the older clients/servers 
to upgrade or die so that the new system has 100% of the message traffic on 
the 'net.  Both of these are *big* obstacles, and adding ePostage ON TOP OF 
THIS makes it considerably harder because we add a complicated payment 
scheme on top of a complicated system upgrade.

If it were easy it would have happened already by now.  And we would all be 
driving cars powered by water.

jc

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 14:18:29 +1100

> Please, please, please stop using cheesy analogies.  There are already
cars
 > that use
 > water for fuel.  The reason they are not released for the general public
 > may not be obvious to you.

>Sure, because as fate would have it they're only available in Saudi
>Arabia where gasoline is cheap and fresh water is very expensive

Still cheesy, but at least funny and insightful, thanks

John