A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

Greg Broiles gbroiles at bivens.parrhesia.com
Tue May 13 16:11:29 EDT 2003


On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 09:06:18AM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> 
> OTOH, I still think a micro-payment postage system is a better idea.
> The sender puts a micro-payment into the mail header to pay the
> recipient to accept/read the message.  For non-spam, the receipient
> doesn't need to cash the payment (or can just return it to the
> sander).  For spam, the receipient collects the money (thereby costing
> the spammer real $$$ to send spam, if most receipients actually
> collect).  The only remaining architectural problem is how to handle
> mailing lits.

If we assume an environment where a payor/spender can later check to see
if their payment was cashed, this also creates a relatively cheap 
way for spammers to create or validate a list of working email 
addresses.

Hash-based lists of spam messages have this property, too - a recipient
of a unique message implicitly validates their email address by 
reporting the message or its hash to a public database of known spams,
if the sender of the message cares to go back and check to see which
of their sent messages have been reported.

Exploits of those features may be a few steps down the road in the spam
arms race, but it's not unthinkable ...

--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles at parrhesia.com 

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