A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

[John Kelsey]

At 03:46 PM 5/12/03 -0400, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
>So, what's my reason to accept a "payment in cpu time"?  As best as I
>can tell, a "payment in cpu time" means that someone *else* doesn't
>get a payment in cpu time with their spam.  I still get the spam.

The realistic benefit is that you can use something like hashcash as one of 
your spam filtering rules.  Anyone who is spending 1/2 sec on a reasonable 
machine per e-mail sent isn't likely to be spamming you, because that won't 
scale up very well for sending out thousands of e-mails at a time.  The 
problem is that until it is widely adopted, it's not a very useful 
additional filter.

There are actually dozens of similar ways to stop nearly all spam, if you 
can deploy them all over the net at once.  But deploying anything all over 
the net at once isn't practical, so instead, each user or ISP tries to find 
some workable solution for the problem, typically involving changing his 
filtering rules  every few months and spending a minute or two a day going 
through his spam folder, making sure he's not throwing away something 
valuable.

>                                                 - Bill

--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD  BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259



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