a bit of lovely news about spam in California

Sat Jan 5 07:59:41 PST 2002

On 5 Jan 2002, Ronald Pottol wrote:

> > > To that end, I am working on a glimmer of an idea....  :-}
> > 
> > A Nobel Prize in Economics awaits the person who solves this one, IMO.  Go 
> > for it.

The real world equiv. of SPAM is of course junk mail.  The fundamental 
difference of course is that the post office gets payed to deliver it and
makes a tidy profit, thus they don't mind.  While on the email side of 
things the majority of the cost is on the delivery end and nobody gets
compensated.  This leads to an extreme economic imbalance that benifits 
the spammer and hurts ISP's and large companies.

One possible solution that occurs to me is to start a second email 
infrastructure that would eventually replace the first.  The new one
would have in place mechanisms for limiting or eliminating SPAM.  There
are ways to do this.  Rate limiting outgoing email from 
users/systems/domains is one possibility.  Another is requiring very
stringent registration and identity requirements for people/entities allowed
to send email on this new system.  I'm sure there are many other potential
methods that could be put in place if a new infrastructure was put in place.
Some of which could be retrofitted on the current system, some of which
couldn't...

All very expensive of course.  The question is, would this be more expensive
then the current and future cost of SPAM?  If the answer is yes, then we 
should all just get used to SPAM and the never ending escalation between 
spammers and those who try stop/slow them down.  If it isn't more expensive, 
than what are people waiting for?  :-)
-- 
Mike Miller             mke @ turbolift.com