spam/avoidance of

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Thu Jan 31 12:19:50 2002

What would be interesting to pursue in the context of disouraging SPAM is the
reorganization of the email scheme such that a single email could only be sent
to a single destination without substantial cost to the sender. Moreover, it
should be done in a way that absolutely ensures that the original sender email
address is contained in the email. That alone would solve a number of
problems.

Yes, this would mean that mailing lists would become more difficult to handle,
but that is not insurmountable. Email needs a mechanism that allows email to
be as low-cost as possible for single-destination emails while costing
significantly more, e.g. 10^(N^N!) for n-destination emails, and charged to
the sender, not to some external route engine that ends up routing a single
message to a bunch of destinations based simply on a list of recipients
included in the original. If one destination cost the sender a penny, two
destinations cost the sender a buck, and three cost him a kilobuck, he'd think
twice about using the net for junk mail.

I've got no problem with the use of the www for commercial purposes, but since
people in other parts of the world, e.g. Europe, pay for hookup time and
download of each email costs something in those terms, it's not right to ask
people to pay for unsolicited junk mail. Further, the bandwidth that the
stuff consumes only brings nearer the time when we here in the U.S. will end
up paying for our internet usage by the bit as do many others throughout the
world. It's incumbent on us, therefore, to do SOMETHING about this. Right
now, it's still a no-cost nuissance to us here in the U.S. but to those in
Europe who pay for the bandwidth they use, and to the system as a whole, it's
already a major cost.

I simply discard the 10% or so of my email that's junk. Likewise, I simply
discard the junk mail I get from the USPS. If it doesn't have a return
address and a postmark, it goes in the trash. True, I've had some checks,
etc, go in the trash, and had to pursue them through other channels, but
unpostmarked items look like junk, and 80% of my snail-mail is junk, so they
go in the trash.

Dick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jerome Fine" <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 9:39 AM
Subject: Re: spam/avoidance of


> >Feldman, Robert wrote:
>
> > Also, how does one enforce a no-call list internationally? A lot of the
spam
> > I get on Hotmail comes from non-US sources. BTW, I started getting spam on
> > Hotmail _before_ I had sent out any email -- just signed up for it and the
> > spam started coming the next day. And their filtering works for only
80%-90%
> > of the spam, as about 10% gets delivered to my inbox.
> > Bob
>
> Jerome Fine replies:
>
> I sounds as if the spam is sent to a list of reasonable e-mail addresses
picked
> by a computer program without any actual verification - unless Hotmail
"sells"
> them - but how would the new list be circulated so quickly?
>
> It seems as if a permanent e-mail address will not be possible until the
spam
> problem is handled by the users themselves.
>
> I just suggested adding 4 random characters (36 ** 4 = 1,679,616) to my
> actual e-mail name (before the _at_) and changing them as needed - BUT
> with a fallback of replacing the 4 random characters with the current year.
> Has anyone ever tried this? Obviously, if it became a standard practice,
> it would not work, but there must be many such replacement methods.
> And in the mean time, e-mail addresses would start to change so often
> than perhaps the ISPs would finally find so much spam mail was being
> rejected that they would actually attempt to stop unsolicited traffic.
>
> Sincerely yours,
>
> Jerome Fine
>
>
Received on Thu Jan 31 2002 - 12:19:50 GMT