Subject: [Asrg] (no subject)

From: Richard Willey <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 07:39:31 -0700

>>3. The mailing list should not focus on implementing its own 
Micropayment 
>>architecture, but rather:
>>
>>(a) Determine whether a working micropayment architecture would 
represent 
>>a feasible solution to SPAM
>>(b) Determine whether an E-Postage system would create a unique set of 
>>requirements for a working micropayments architecture.
>>(c) Attempt to ballpark a set of parameters that describe the boundary 
>>conditions necessary to make an E-Postage system feasible. ...

> ... which remains entirely hypothetical since nobody has any idea how
>to build a micropayment system within a couple of orders of magnitude
>of what you'd need for any plausible e-mail system.  The unique
>requirement is be that the vast majority of attempted transactions
>would be bogus which rules out a lot of statistical approaches, but
>it's the scale that's the killer.

Not sure whether I necessarily buy into this assertion:

One size does not fit all, and an anti-SPAM solution that is appropriate 
for one set of mail exchanges will not necessarily be applied to all mail 
exchanges.

When I think about email, I differentiate between two different types of 
transactions:

One set of exchanges occurs went I communicate with a relatively small 
group of individuals with whom I have some sort of trust relationship:

This includes:

(a) The people that I work with
(b) My friends
(c) My family

These transactions encompass the vast majority of the emails that I send 
and receive.
Equally significant, they don't require any type of E-Postage or 
Micropayments.
Instead, some combination of whie listing and digital signatures 
represents a very efficient solution to this type of communications.

However, there is a second set of email exchages that I need to consider. 
On occasion, I receive emails from "random" individuals with whom I don't 
have any kind of pre-existing trust relationship.
While these exchanges are relatively infrequent, they often contain 
important information.

Here, we require some form of additional solution that can be used to 
screen the wheat from the chaff.
There are a wide variety of technical solutions that have been proposed 
including:

(a) Challenge Response
(b) Micro-Payments
(c) Intelligent Filters.

Personally, I think that the Micro-Payment systems offer the best 
approach.
This is technology that is going to be adopted / deployed anyway and I'd 
just as soon piggyback off it.

Your arguments that the system would collapse under transaction volume 
seem to assume that all emails would need to E-Postage rather than a 
selective subset.

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From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 12:22:38 -0700

> On the other hand, outside the US, bandwidth is much more 
> expensive and
> any form of filtering that during or after the data phase is more
> expensive than JHD. Could we please keep this fact in mind when
> discussing solutions?

I don't think it is relevant for two reasons:

1) Bandwidth costs are dropping pretty much everywhere. 

2) Deterrence is a viable strategy.

In the long term it does not matter if you filter before or after the
message is received, provided you block a sufficient proportion of spam
to make the business uneconomic.

		Phill