Ted Gavin said: >> The goal of e-postage is to provide incentives >> where none exist. > > To whom is the incentive offered? The recipient > ISP, or the recipient? Or both? That is, after > all, my question that started this line of > discussion.
Michael Rathbun commented: >> To conform to the "postage" model, a system >> would need to apportion and distribute the >> proceeds to EVERY entity involved in each >> email delivery. I know that recipients (of whom I am one) would be a lot happier if spam did not represent extra costs to them, either directly in terms of costs of bandwidth, storage, et cetera, or indirectly in terms of those same costs being passed on by their ISPs as increased costs to them. But I don't think the "postage" model has to be quite as complex as that. Implementing it at the MX-to-MX step should be sufficient. Receiving MX asks for "postage" and the sending MX better have some ready. So how does this translate into increased cost to the sender and decreased cost to the recipient? The sender's ISP is going to have to cough up the postage bucks, which they'll pass on to the sender in terms of extra costs (either broken out on a per-user basis if they so desire, or averaged). The recipient's ISP will get an additional funding source, and can therefore (presuming the postage cost is set high enough) reduce what they charge their users. I'm paying close to $100 for my DSL (with a bandwidth cap!), so there's plenty of room for my ISP to reduce that cost. ;) Look at real-world postage. What share of that goes to the recipient? None. Put a mailbox in front of your house, and a nice person comes along 6 days a week, takes whatever mail you've put in it, leaves you whatever people have sent you, free. You chuck what you don't want and keep what you do. Yes, there are still issues of storage space, and the time it takes to chuck the spam. But if the postage model can be made to work just from MX to MX, then you have an "advertising supported medium" much like the traditional postal service, TV, radio, et cetera. And the end-user can still chuck the junk mail, set their Tivo-or-whatever to skip commercials, and have Mail.app chuck as much of their spam as possible. I don't think that's ultimately a solution, since it would just result in the "big players" dominating our inboxes a la Publishers' Clearing House, etc. - I'm just trying to think outside the (mail)box a little. -Dan _______________________________________________ spamcon-general mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.spamcon.org/mailman/listinfo/spamcon-general#subscribers Subscribe, unsubscribe, etc: Use the URL above or send "help" in body of message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact administrator: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
