Subject: [Asrg] E-postage and stamps

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 13:26:34 -0500

>> But the recipient Y will be able to tell if he's seen the same stamp 
twice.  That's trivial to deal with, especially since most modern MUAs 
(well, Eudora and Apple Mail, anyway) index their mail archive already 
by default.

> As for verifying crypto signatures, the public key from the vendor is 
needed for that, since the vendor issued the stamp.  This is, broadly 
speaking, a one-time operation, which happens after the sender vendor's 
trustworthiness has been looked up.  It's also an operation that could 
potentially be offloaded on the recipient's vendor, since the recipient 
is probably going to send the stamp there for reimbursement anyway.

This really is amusing in a pitiful sort of way.

Other than STILL trying to create the world's biggest micropayments system 
(which really IS a solution in search of a problem, it seems...) what the hell 
is the point of worrying about all this?

Who needs encryption, who needs single-use detection?

My idea where recipients can hand out an assortment of "stamp tokens" for free 
along with their E-mail address would handle the same issues pretty well.  The 
person sending would need to include at least one recognized "stamp token" 
either in the Subject line or perhaps in an extra header line somehow.  The 
recipient could have an arbitrary number of "stamp tokens" outstanding and could 
revoke any or all of them any time they wished.  Using nonstandard mechanisms 
for relating the stamp token required with the E-mail address (and how to 
present the stamp token) would pretty well invalidate E-mail address harvesters. 
The recipients' E-mail system could provide a database function to help identify 
past legitimate mailers who had used the compromised stamp token, to alert them 
to the changed token.

I don't really care in general for the idea of "stamps" but if you're all going 
to fixate like this on the E-postage concept, then you might as well at least 
look at other ways to make it harder to send out megatons of E-mail 
indiscriminately.

Gordon Peterson                  http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002  Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support free and fair US elections!  http://stickers.defend-democracy.org
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.

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