[LINK] NYT/SMH: To beat spam, pay to send email

[Jan Whitaker]

At 11:15 AM 4/02/04 +0800, Jim Birch wrote:

>Using a set of these techniques would eliminate nearly all spam.
>Attempts to get past these makes spamming harder with fewer, more visible 
>sources

Well, if the ISPs are after stopping junk traffic on the networks [they 
could give a rip about customers; it's the traffic that bothers them], then 
these approaches don't stop much.  Seems you would need a similar model in 
server to server traffic that stopped the traffic before it started across 
the ocean [since most spam is off shore for us; US situation would be/is? 
different?].  Having the individual person deal with filtering, black 
lists, etc. doesn't solve the upstream problem.  So the intervention 
strategy needs to be different as well.  Paying the freight may help the 
IPSs, but not you and me.  Just shifts the economics of the problem.

Remember when we didn't have spam before the .com emergence?  We may have 
had unanticipated contacts from people around the world, but that was cool, 
not a nuisance.  I once spent a week in Budapest in the home of the sister 
of the head of the Hungarian Academy of Science [dinner with him] in those 
days and travelled most of Europe on a similar arrangement.  Couldn't do 
that quite as easily nowadays.

Jan

JLWhitaker Associates
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at melbpc.org.au  --  http://member.melbpc.org.au/~jwhit/whitentr.htm
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