why IPv6 isn't ready for prime time, SMTP edition

Thu Mar 27 18:15:26 UTC 2014

On March 26, 2014 at 22:25 owen at delong.com (Owen DeLong) wrote:
 > 
 > Actually, a variant on that that might be acceptable… Make e-postage a deposit-based thing. If the recipient has previously white-listed you or marks your particular message as “desired”, then you get your postage back. If not, then your postage is put into the recipients e-postage account to offset the cost of their emails.
 > 
 > Thoughts?

It's a fine idea but too complicated.

Look, the (paper) post office doesn't say "oh, you WANTED that mail,
ok, then we'll return the cost of postage to the sender!"

Why? Because if they did that people would game the system, THEY'D
SPAM!

And it would take way too much bookkeeping and fraud identification etc.

Let's take a deep breath and re-examine the assumptions:

Full scale spammers send on the order of one billion msgs per day.

Which means if I gave your account 1M free msgs/day and could
reasonably assure that you can't set up 1,000 such accts then you
could not operate as a spammer.

Who can't operate with 1M msgs/day?

Well, maybe Amazon or similar.

But as I said earlier MAYBE THEY SHOULD PAY ALSO!

We really need to get over the moral component of spam content (and
senders' intentions) and see it for what it is: A free ride anyone
would take if available.

Ok, a million free per acct might be too high but whatever, we can all
go into committee and do studies and determine what the right number
should be.

I'd tend towards some sort of sliding scale myself, 100K/day free,
1M/day for $1, 10M/day for $100, 100M/day for $10K, etc. Something like
that.

Why would it work?

Because that's how human society works.

People who are willing to pay their $10K/mo will demand something be
done about freeloaders, enforcement has to be part of the cost
overhead.

And it'd create an economy for hunting down miscreants.

There really is none now, outside of the higher profile DDoS or
phishing sort of activities.

I claim it wouldn't take much of this to shut down spammers.

P.S. And in my vision accepting only email with valid e-postage would
be voluntary though I suppose that might be "voluntary" at the
provider level. For example someone like gmail at some point (of
successful implementation of this scheme) might decide to just block
invalid e-postage because hey your gmail acct is free! Let someone
else sell you rules you prefer like controlling acceptance of invalid
e-postage yourself.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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