[Mailman-Users] The economics of spam

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Thu, 2008-12-25 at 00:06 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> So I don't think we even want to joke about financial penalties for
> spamming, because in the end it's applications like Mailman and this
> list itself that will end up as collateral damage in any such solution.
> 
>  > If you wanted to be of service to the community, you could always write 
>  > a milter in Python that would go through all the same checks that 
>  > Mailman would do and indicate back to the MTA whether or not the message 
>  > would be accepted.
> 
> First I'd have to find out what those checks are, especially since in
> my own case a lot of mail gets discards by humans.
> 
> Economics is what I do for a living; giving free advice in the "dismal
> science" may be the best contribution I can make.

Charging (someone) per email, while it's an attractive concept, seems to
be kind of a technological mismatch.  There are paradigms that can be
associated with hard-copy paper mail that just don't apply to email.
For instance, how do you deal appropriately with DSNs in such a system?
How about mail addressed to "postmaster" which, by RFC, must be
supported.  Email has evolved more along the lines of the TCP/IP packet
paradigm rather than that associated with postal hard-copy snail-mail.
There are aspects of email that resemble ICMP packets far more than they
resemble Christmas cards.

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