Details on a "pay for email" proposal

[kgouldsk]

This was talked about a few weeks ago here. This is a pretty good FAQ list that explains how the proposal would work. Basically, participating mail systems would work so that the sender would "put up" some small amount of money as a bond, held by a third party, and when the recipient either:
- is verified to have the sender in an approved whitelist
or
- accepts the mail and releases the bond
the sender gets their bond money back.

So in the end, the sender should pay nothing for most of his email transactions. Spammers would have to pay a bunch. It's a method of penalizing people who send mail you don't want....now only if we could do it to the credit card companies with paper mail!


http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~tloder/abm_faq.html#mozTocId747153

 

[kgouldsk]

The biggest flaw I can see with this is when suddenly, I post a message somewhere unlike here, where word would get around, and say,

"Hey everyone, I got a great deal on some framistats, I'm willing to sell them for 5.50 plus postage - they're normally 20 bucks. Email me to speak for one." So since everyone uses framistats at least 5 times a day, they're in high demand, and there would be a flood of people emailing, he could just refuse to release the bond and he would get 1000 x .10 = $100.

 

[Gary Wells]

Nothing to do but troll all day, huh?

 

[kgouldsk]

I'm not sure what you're referring to-that's not my intention. I was presenting this as information because there's a very old email that circulates talking about the US Post starting to charge for email. It came up on the board one day. While that email is a hoax, this is an example of where some form of financial remuneration may be used within future email systems to bring the insane levels of spam under control. I thought perhaps some of the members would be interested in seeing it, particularly because it pertains to a previous thread on here.

 

[MistaScott]

Yes, and that e-mail is 100% crap and so are any proposals dealing with charging for email.

 

[kgouldsk]

Yes the email is BS.....but the link I pointed to is not. It is a genuine and workable proposal. It doesn't end up costing anyone legitimately sending mail any money, but there's money involved for people who send mail that's not wanted. There's some technical stuff involved so I don't expect everyone cares enough to read it to understand - just know that this isn't a hoax, and it isn't something to take advantage of people, it's something that will help a severe problem. At my former employer, we discarded 80% of incoming mail because it was junk. When you're dealing with that kind of volume, you inevitably throw some good stuff away. And everyone hates the junk at home as well.