[Mailman-Users] The economics of spam

[Jan Steinman]

On 3 Jan 09, at 18:23, J.A. Terranson wrote:

> On Sat, 3 Jan 2009, Mark Sapiro wrote:
>
>> That's not an apt analogy. The issue here is not whether a system can
>> be developed that would require mail delivery to be paid for. The
>
> See: http://www.hashcash.org/

So it seems one way of guaranteeing that one would only receive email  
that had been paid for is implemented, or at least prototyped. I'm  
going to look into this hashcash a bit, just out of curiosity.

I was thinking more on the level of a new, incompatible SMTP standard,  
or possibly even at lower levels of the ISO stack -- possibly at the  
TCP/IP level. Or perhaps as part of IP6 protocol, coming to you Any  
Day Now.

Perhaps I know just enough about the underpinnings of the Internet to  
see the possibilities, rather than the impossibilities. Sorry if my  
examples were impractical, but I continue to dis-believe that it would  
be impossible to implement a system whereby spam could be made  
uneconomical.


:::: Never fear failure! If inevitable, embrace it! ::::
:::: Jan Steinman http://www.EcoReality.org ::::