-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 10:07 PM -0500 on 3/24/03, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> How would this work with legit mailing list servers making a > delivery attempt? From what I understand, when I send something to > Politech, postfix will try to connect to aol.com and deliver over a > thousand messages in quick succession. That's more efficient than a > thousand connections with one message each. Unfortunately, if we ever went to sender-pays, we'd probably climb an authentication hierarchy which got us exactly that. First you sign your messages, to cryptographically authenticate them against a whitelist. Then you encrypt a coin in a message to the recipient's public key. At this point you've definitely made every message unique. Some kind of modified SMTP process decrypts that message, redeems/reissues the coin, and, if the postage is enough, lets the message through. This assumes SMTP on every machine, no POP per se, which is consistent with the always-on, end-to-end net we all want anyway. You need on-line mail handling, because you need on-line double-spending prevention. All of the above presupposes a lot, obviously. In the meantime, some kind of sender-pays book-entry-settled clearinghouse agreement between large-volume SMTP processors will do a reasonable job of killing most spam, and it would do so transparently to most users. Of course, as Steve has noted already, people with legitimate commercial offers will just pay for the privilege, which, frankly, is as it should be. The cost of anything is the foregone alternative. Ultimately, if you send a lot of mail using SMTP, you get a bill. If you receive a lot of mail, you send a bill. A clearinghouse consolidates and "crosses" all the bills and net-settles on a batch cycle. Even cross-border transactions could be handled this way, because, frankly, volume senders will get a bill or get kicked out of the settlement system. You get black-holing, but you get black-holing with an audit-trail, and a measurement of actual monetary damages, to boot. It wouldn't take long for that to result in a refusals to peer with someone upstream of a known spammer. You've identified spammers and choked them off, economically, at their point of origin, which solves the problem at its cause, the mis-pricing of an asset. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPn/1FsPxH8jf3ohaEQJZhwCg/4/Wj34DYEoxjJDmTW6Z/YSCih0AnRNI f+gfsiHvUOlelEeXmzzRHOV+ =ZW2o -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
