> or how about this,.. you wait until the supposed law goes into effect > arising out of Bill 602P which will permit the Federal Government to charge > a > 5-cent surcharge on every e-mail delivered, by billing Internet Service > Providers at source. The consumer would then be billed in turn by the ISP.
Even though S602P is an urban legend, IMHO it contains the kernel of a potential solution. Long time list members here may remember that 3-4 years ago I proposed the idea of a transfer of payments system to charge senders of unsolicited e-mail for the privilege. This revenue would be shared by the backbones transporting the message and the receiving ISP/recipient. For _solicited_ e-mail it would be the recipient who was charged, with the sender then sharing in the revenue pool. Would I pay something like $0.01 for each message I receive from List Managers? Yes, I think I would, because I value the messages I receive from this list and from the other lists I'm on. At a penny a message, this list would have cost me under a dollar a month so far this year. Now consider the spammer. The reason spam is multiplying is that it is virtually cost free. But if it were to cost the sender $10,000 to send out a million messages, I think we'd see a whole lot less spam. And if that cost were charged to the 'originating' ISP instead of to the hacker who used an open mail relay port to insert e-mail with a forged address, wouldn't that create a major incentive for ISP's to FINALLY make their mail systems secure? I'm not the expert, but I think that some kind of public/private key encryption system would make it reasonably easy to 'tag' every solicited e-mail message. (I'd go one step further and revise the SMTP protocol to verify that both the sending and recipient addresses are valid before sending the body of the message, though I'm not sure how relaying would work under this.) I know I'm not 'important enough' in the net world to work towards a serious consideration of this idea by myself, but maybe it is time to establish a group who can. I've been working on a letter to my Senators regarding S630, I may have to revise it to include this idea. -- Mike Nolan
