Subject: Re: [Asrg] (no subject)

From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: 27 Apr 2004 15:25:39 -0000

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

Yup.  Since spammers will try to sneak in there, you need some sort of
hard to break authentication to identify their mail.  Maybe something
like domain keys will do the trick.  S/MIME sure hasn't.  Any
suggestions?

>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.

Agreed.  How much do you expect people to be willing to pay you in
order or how many hoops will they be willing to jump through in order
to send you important information?

>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.

I eagerly await your discussion of how you expect people to build a
micropayment system that will handle a useful amount of mail (a good
beta size would be five billion messages a day), run at a cost that
people would be willing to pay (closer to a penny a message than to a
dollar a message), and won't be subverted by spammers using fake
postage, used postage, hijacked machines, and a dozen other scams we
haven't thought of yet.

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

PS: This discussion reminds me of people saying that current
automobiles are unsatisfactory because the fuel is dirty and
expensive, therefore future cars will run on water.  Water is
plentiful and ecologically benign.  I don't have any idea how a
water-powered car would work and neither does anyone else, but I think
that cars will run on water anyway.

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---

From: Barry Shein <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 18:27:24 -0400

>postage, used postage, hijacked machines, and a dozen other scams we

5 billion transactions per day doesn't impress me as proof positive
of anything, particularly world-wide.

Obviously if we can deliver that many emails per day THEN WE CLEARLY
CAN HANDLE THAT MANY TRANSACTIONS PER DAY! Nicht wahr?

And if we can deliver that many emails today at nearly no incremental
cost, or so it appears, then what do you base your insinuation that
adding the overhead of metering etc would skyrocket the cost on?

We seem to have added all manner of spam filtering, right down to
handshaking with multiple remote blacklists per message and running
each one through all kinds of DNS and content checks such as
spamassassin or various commercial spam filtering services'
software.

And all that doesn't seem to have, by its mere overhead, taken down
the entire world email system, yet, even if it's a lousy trend. But
it's not unreasonable to predict that if we had a pretty good, unified
system for preventing spam in the first place (such as an e-postage
system as idealized) then all that other overhead infrastructure would
be taken apart, or most of it anyhow.

So why do you keep asserting that adding the overhead that might be
incurred in other per-message proposals is so obviously the straw that
shall break the camel's back? (gak! lousy sentence, sorry.)

As to scams, we're there right now (e.g., hijacked zombies, filter
bypassing schemes intuitive boxcar rummage big<dfetererere>ger <font
color=#ffffff>better</font>), but yes there's work to do or else we'd
be done.

>that cars will run on water anyway.

I cannot imagine a topic which might be discussed on this research
group for which this paragraph *couldn't* be a response. Can you?

If we knew the right answer then I think we'd be done.

But unless you're quite sure you've discovered some mathematical or
physical law being violated (e.g., someone quite literally proposes a
perpetual motion machine or equivalent and I mean "quite literally"
quite literally) I don't see what a meta-comment like the above adds
to the discussion. With all due respect.

Otherwise it just strikes me as bullying forth a particular agenda
while adding little or less. And one of questionable veracity, at
least prima facie, IMHBCO.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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