[13282] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Declan McCullagh)
Fri May 16 11:51:55 2003
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:59:25 -0400
To: Sunder <sunder@sunder.net>
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Cc: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@bivens.parrhesia.com>,
Derek Atkins <derek@ihtfp.com>, cypherpunks@lne.com,
cryptography@metzdowd.com
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0305140943210.1920-100000@anon7.arachelian.c
om>
At 09:57 AM 5/14/2003 -0400, Sunder wrote:
>Yes, but how will you stop the spammer from double spending the same $0.25
>micropayment on all of his 170,000 email addresses? Depending on whether
>you check that there is a payment attached or not, and also check it with
>the bank before delivering it, you'd have already wasted your bandwith and
>possibly have accepted a spam into your mail spool.
It is true that the notions of micropayments as applied to spam (that I'm
familiar with, at least) would require that the email recipient check with
the bank to detect doublespending. This would introduce an additional delay
before delivery from unknown senders, yes, but I fail to see how it would
impose an unacceptable cost in bandwidth or CPU usage.
Spammers could still try the same-micropayment-a-million-times route, just
as they could try to spam without micropayments, but if their email is
rejected in sufficient quantities, the cost to the spammer would outweigh
the benefits. The key is achieving sufficient quantities.
-Declan
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