Tim Howe wrote: > the next Outlook worm that hits the streets will cause said program > to send a lot of postmarked mail to certain places for major profit > to the writer and major losses to a lot of people.
Good point. Maybe there should be an administrative limit: I only authorize my clearinghouse for $2/day in postage. When the worm hits, I'm out $2 or $4. The person who gets all that mail can probably be sued to get the money back. And the public has more reason to drop Outlook. > If we have some kind of authentication that we trust our money with, > why isn't that authentication good enough to use without bringing > money into it? Two words: Spammer pays.* If there's no money in the system, there's no way to take money from a spammer. Professional spammers can and will fake authentication -- just look at how many ISP accounts they go through in a week. I'm interested in hearing about other effective ways to punish spammers. I suggested legal remedies, and you didn't like that. I suggested a market-based remedy, and you don't like that. > I would like to say that I think every idea presented here so far, > including mine, have major problems that are possibly worse than spam. > In the case of my original argument for rejecting known sources in > order to convince them to stop or whatever, I don't think > participation would be high enough to even begin to make that work. There's no need to theorize about blackhole lists. MAPS and ORBS have been in operation for several years. I'd summarize their experiences as "miserable failure", but that might be a little harsh. > I would be so upset over for-pay email and/or laws governing email > that I would probably find myself another line of work out of pure > grief. You're still pretty upset about the land surveyors and property deeds, too, I suppose. (-: I think the frontier has been settled, and the townspeople are demanding a sheriff. The days of the lone rangers are numbered, and the vigilante posses aren't keeping the streets safe. > At the risk of making another bad analogy, I often open the door and > listen for a few minutes to people who try to sell things to me at > my door (be it religion or magazines). Often? More than 20 times a day? Are the sidewalks so cluttered with these people that your friends sometimes leave you standing on their stoop, because they can't see you through the crowd of J Witnesses and politicians? Can the $political_party National Committee send 100,000 proselytizers out for under $100 a month? I'll say it again -- we've only seen the tip of the spam iceberg. There are no constraints in the system preventing it from becoming 100 times worse. We need to create constraints, or we need to give up on email. Thank you, Tim. Your objections to the system I'd like to build are good ones, and I'm glad I (sort of) understand your viewpoint. I'll keep refining my arguments... (-: ---------------------------------- * Spammer pays. That's the whole idea right there. Let me trademark that. Put it on a T-shirt. -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
