z2003-10-13- Bray Spam Pay Mail Relay (WebSeitz/wikilog)

WebSeitz/wikilog

z2003-10-13- Bray Spam Pay Mail Relay

Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

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last edited by BillSeitz on Jul 1, 2008 5:20 am

TimBray on advancing the Spam Wars by setting up relays as certification authorities, and you pay to send through them. The model is:

I set my filters so that anything not in my people White List, or signed by a relay I trust, goes into a probable-spam hole. (Actually, Tim says every message needs to be signed. I guess geeks (senders) could get their own signatures; this would allow them to Route Around the relayers, but that would increase the hassle to each receiver having to accept more unique signatures).
- Jon Udell has written about signing emails for a long time.
I publish in my various spaces (blog, FOAF) that anyone (who I don't already know) who wants to contact me needs to use such a relayer (maybe I suggest a couple that I've already decided to trust) to sign their messages.
- is there a mechanism where once I (the initially-stranger) establish contact/trust with you, I don't need to use the relayer any more? That could be a hassle, since you would have to switch signatures to associate with me.

Random thoughts:

it's still mainly a client-side solution, since each user (recipient) needs to decide to start accepting messages signed by each given relayer.
- This doesn't deal with the network congestion costs of spam, though maybe it does in the long term by making spam not worth sending
- Will users just mindlessly accept every request, just like they click on attachments? Then every spammer could just run his own bogus relay.
- So short of his side-point of having the government certify (some of) them, I wonder whether this would actually work.
the point isn't the payment so much as the relayer having software/policies to ensure you can't send more than 100 emails in a day without an (email) exchange to verify that everything's all right. So, potentially, AOL/YaHoo/[MSN] (or any other group, like Slash Dot) could run relays as a free service.
his $0.01/per message is like a $10CPM...

Update: Tim has update the original page with comments and clarifications. He wants a very small number of relayers; this reduces the pattern of "training" users to accept any old signature.

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Bill Seitz, fluxent at gmail dot com, Weblog