economics of spam (Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?)

David Honig dahonig at cox.net
Mon May 12 21:23:53 EDT 2003


At 09:45 PM 5/12/03 +0100, Adam Back wrote:
>In addition it is expected that there would be a mechanism whereby
>regular correspondents would white list each other.  (Probably
>automatically via their mail clients).
>
>Whether you think a few seconds is sufficient depends on your views of
>the economics of spamming.  Ie how close to losing break-even the
>spammers are, and whether a few seconds of CPU per message is enough
>to significantly increase the cost.  

Two points.  First, Joe Sixpack won't use it if it requires
an extra click; but he might if the mail queueing is in
the background.

Second, spammers use trojans that establish local mail relays (!)
You think they won't steal some cycles to pollute? 

Ok, three points.  If you're sending from your PDA, 
either deal with the battery-life-loss as a cost of 
emailing from your PDA, or have your net-connected host
do the work.  Again, transparently, or no one will use it.

Personally, I favor an Assasination Politics flavor solution,
but that's unlikely to gain widespread favor :-)








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