anybody else been spammed by "no-ip.com" yet?

Sat May 4 10:28:56 UTC 2002

On Sat, 4 May 2002, Forrest W. Christian wrote:

>
> I'm going to make a suggestion which I realize that today there isn't any
> easy way to do this.  However, I want to throw this out because I think if
> we could figure out how to do it, I think the spam problem will go away.
>
> Anytime anyone sends a mail to my server, I want to be paid 2 cents.
>

Apart from the various obvious problme with this (as elaborated by someone
else already), this could make things worse overall.

Its an interesting, but naive idea.. The moment there's money to be made
in receiving email, someone will exploit it in ways you won't expect.

Bandwidth is about a dollar/gig nowadays? Thus, thats about 50,000
emails/dollar of bandwidth, and that dollar is capable of making the smart
entrepreneur $1000.[1]

Now, how do I build a ``business plan'' so that many people send me short
bits of email, and where I can act as an email sink?

Off of the top of my head:

    Troll for cash?  (Like I am right now! :)

    Make a zombie network that continiously sends me email?

    Lottery sites. (``Send an email for a chance to win! The more
    emails, the bigger the pot and the higher your chances.'')

    Subscribe to every mailing list under the sun?

    I don't remember my SMTP, but this may adjust economics so that
    bounce messages are a financial cost and are no longer sent and/or may
    be used to bankrupt an orginzation.

And, will that business plan be worse than the current situation?

Scott

P.S. If you get what you want, I'm going to get a business method patent
on the email lottery idea..... I got college loans to pay off!

[1]
This raises an interesting question of how can you claim an email costs
$.02 to receive, when the bandwidth to get it is about 3 orders of
magnitude less, and diskspace costs 2 orders of magnitude less ($10/gig)?

If your average user gets 10 emails/day, that means that each user gets
300 emails/month, and costs you $6.00 in resources?

If you have dialup users paying $20/month, do you kick them off if they
subscribe to a busyish mailing list and get over 35 emails/day?

In terms of ISP resources, emails cannot be costing $.02 each to receive.

In terms of the time to delete them, I could believe that they cost $.02
each. (If you value your time at $20/hour, $.02 is 3 seconds)