On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Ed Gerck wrote:
> Someday, however, users will want to stop using postcards for all
> their electronic conversations. At that time, at zero added cost,
> we can easily introduce a mandatory per-message burden to spammers
> and make it backward compatible (so that we don't disrupt anything).
> The proposal points out that both goals (privacy and anti-spam) can
> be served not with signing but with encryption (even though, as an
> add on, signing may also help).
This is where the thinking is not clear: You can't add a cost to only
spammers. Any cost increase in the cost of email would affect other large
email users (mailing lists, and such) at best equally to spammers, and
maybe not even equally. Most spam is sent from infected computers, so the
spammer wouldn't pay anyway (whether it is money or computational power).
Further, any cost increase in email that is less than the cost of bulk
postal mail will not deter genuine spammers. But even the regular user
would feel the crunch if each email cost $0.37. If the IETF had to pay
$0.37 per email, or even $0.15 per email, its 2 million/yr or so budget
would not cover its email costs, and your draft would not be published.
--Dean
