On 25 Dec 2008 at 12:41, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > Again, assuming that traffic patterns stay the same, this is all very > nice for AOL, which would have a substantial positive balance of > payments. But it would suck rotten eggs for open source projects, > whose primary interaction with the mail system is to host mailing > lists that on average must have tiny inward flow and significant > outward flow.
This is wildly offtopic for this list and I, too, am going to stop prolonging it, but I'll just mention that this is the *CRUX* of the problem: what do you do if you want to let a "white hat" server that sends a million messages a month do so unencumbered but still somehow penalize/charge a "black hat" spamhaus. I *THINK* that the folks here, earlier, said that they'd be willing to pay to have a global/overall email system that was essentially spam free, and that means that the 'white hat' folks running mailing lists would have to figure out what to do. There are three obvious choices [this no matter what scheme is used to set up pay-for-play]: 1) be on a hosting server that out of the goodness of their hearts will eat the costs, 2) have the list admins eat the cost [e.g., if SUN "bankrolls" the Java mailing list or something like that], or 3) have the lists go to a subscription basis. On (3), since we were proposing one-one-hundredth of a [US] cent per message, that means that for me to sign up for this list [what: a thousand messages a year?] it would cost me something like a dime a year to subscribe. I'd pay that. > Will traffic patterns stay the same? I think not. If AOL refuses > mail without postage, delivery from my lists (not to mention from > listmaster) to @aol.com addresses will stop. They can try to bill me, > in which case they have no legal way to enforce since I haven't > negotiated a contract with them. And I will simply unsubscribe all > existing AOL addresses and bar them from subscribing in the future. This re-emphasizes that whatever criticisms you've made of various schemes for effecting this kind of thing, you basically have a fundamental philsophical refusal to accept the approach at all. Basically, you *INSIST* that you be permitted to send your email for free, regardless of the distributed costs. I don't see why email should be free [and indeed, our experience with spammers would seem to indicate that email-all-you-want-for-free is an idea that probably should have died when NSF opened the net to outsiders] /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:ber...@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <-- ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
