On Sat, 5 Jul 2025, [email protected] wrote:
Put another way: Why is there no economics behind solving any of this?
The economics is that any free messaging service fills up with spam,
starting with a short-lived flat rate telegraph service in the late 1800s.
In the 1980s and 1990s there were mail systems that charged, like MCI
Mail, and they all died because Internet mail was free to send and worked
just as well.
Starting in the late 1990s we got free ad supported mail services which,
as you may have noticed, now are used by the majority of mail users.
There are still mail providers that charge and provide better service (if
you pay, you're the customer, after all) but of course they still get
spam.
There's definitely economics of mail security service -- companies from
Spamhaus to Proofpoint to Trend Micro charge for what they do and made a
decent business of it.
Now and then somemone who doesn't understand the way mail works has the
bright idea that if we* could just charge 1c per message, spam would go
away. I wrote this white paper 20 years paper and nothing has changed
except that some of the numbers now have another zero or two:
https://taugh.com/epostage.pdf
Regards,
John Levine, [email protected], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
* - typically for a version of "we" that they get to collect the 1c
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