Subject: Re: [Asrg] Shannon Jacob's article on spam

From: "John Fenley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 11:39:10 -0600

From: "Shannon Jacobs" <[email-masked]>
>There are plenty of things wrong
>with snail mail, but it does work quite effectively in limiting the volume
>of physical spam we receive

Many people cite the lack of substantial ammounts of Snail-mail as a proof 
that an economic sollution to spam can work. I recieve as much Snail-mail 
spam, as i do E-mail spam.

About 2 years ago I added up the postage of all the Snail-Spam i recieved in 
a typical month. I found that Bulk Snail mailers spend over $200 per month 
in postage to send me advertisements. The volume of mail (as percieved) has 
not decreased since then. My situation is probably at the extreme end of the 
spectrum as my family has lived at the same address for over 50 years, but 
advertising in general is a multi-billion dollar per year industry. To think 
that advertisers won't pay money to send email is (i feel) an assumption 
without sufficient proof.

John Fenley

_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online  
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963

_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

---

From: "Shannon Jacobs" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 06:13:43 +0900

Not sure how to take it, but quite sure that I don't really want to be
featured in the Subject: lines.

First, for clarification, I of course agree that snail mail junk mail
exists. It is slightly annoying, but nothing like the annoyance of spam
email. I sort my snail mail and mailbox flyers as I walk to my door, and 95%
of the junk is deposited unopened in the trash bag. I have never received a
penis enlargement or 419 solicitation via snail mail. At least the snail
mail comes from legitimate businesses, and advertising to reach customers is
one of their legitimate expenses.

However, with email we have the potential to do much better if we devise the
proper economic model. Right now the spammers are forcing us to spend
additional money handling their spam. More machines for filtering. Lawyers
to write more laws. Why can't we turn that around and spend money to offer
better email services?

I hope Mr. Fenley doesn't object to my using his situation as an example of
the potential. He reports that legitimate companies are willing to spend up
to $200/month in postage to try to get his attention and business. As he
notes, that's based on a long history at that address--but our email
addresses can follow us when we move. We know they're going to send it to
him, but wouldn't it be even better and more efficient if Mr. Fenley got
most of that advertising by email and split the savings with the
advertisers? Add in the printing costs for glossy color flyers and we can
probably guess they spend $500/month in his case, but as email, the cost of
"printing" and delivery would be much smaller. I'm just pulling numbers out
of my hat here, because we don't have a real-world business model here
(yet), but we know that copying files and email are cheap. So let's just say
that they could produce and deliver the same ads via email for $50/month
(mostly design costs), give Mr. Fenley $200/month as payment for receiving
them, and still SAVE $250/month on their advertising costs. Doesn't that
sound like an attractive economic model all around? The businesses that use
that approach reduce their costs, and Mr. Fenley gets to share in their
savings.

We still need to filter email, but we should be using those filtering cycles
to enforce OUR interests on the advertisers.

There are various anti-spam email systems out there, but so far all of the
ones I've looked at expect me to pay blackmail "insurance" charges to get
rid of the spam. This is a WRONG economic model, and I will NOT be
blackmailed.

If you know of an anti-spam email system that will block any advertising
UNLESS the advertisers pay MY price for MY time, then please tell me about
it. I'll sign up and consider my spam problem solved.

John Fenley wrote:
>> with snail mail, but it does work quite effectively in limiting the
>> volume of physical spam we receive
>
> Many people cite the lack of substantial amounts of Snail-mail as a
> proof that an economic solution to spam can work. I receive as much
> Snail-mail spam, as I do E-mail spam.
>
> About 2 years ago I added up the postage of all the Snail-Spam I
> received in a typical month. I found that Bulk Snail mailers spend
> over $200 per month in postage to send me advertisements. The volume
> of mail (as perceived) has not decreased since then. My situation is
> probably at the extreme end of the spectrum as my family has lived at
> the same address for over 50 years, but advertising in general is a
> multi-billion dollar per year industry. To think that advertisers
> won't pay money to send email is (I feel) an assumption without
> sufficient proof.
<snip>

---

From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 15:20:26 -0400

>to write more laws. Why can't we turn that around and spend money to offer
[....]
>to enforce OUR interests on the advertisers.
[....]
>rid of the spam. This is a WRONG economic model, and I will NOT be

Perhaps we can start a discussion about the economic models of spam control 
and various systems possible. Below is a quote from section 1.7. of Dave 
Crocker's draft on spam control mechanims 
(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-crocker-spam-techconsider-01.txt), 
we can start off discussion with this:

-------snip-----
Postal mail imposes a fee on the sender for each message that is sent. Such 
a fee makes the cost of sending significant, and proportional to the amount 
sent.  In contrast, current Internet mail is very nearly free to the 
sender.  Hence there is interest in exploring "sender pays" email.

One form of sender-pays is identical to postal stamping.  Another entails 
"retribution" to the sender, taking the fee for their posting only if the 
recipient indicates they were unhappy to receive it. For both models, it is 
not clear that it is possible to retroactively fit the necessary mechanisms 
to Internet mail. Its complete absence from the current service and the 
existence of anonymous and free email services may provide too much 
operational inertia.  It is also not clear who should receive the fees or 
how they should be disbursed.
-------snip-----

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yakov Shafranovich / <[email-masked]>
SolidMatrix Research, a division of SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One who watches the wind will never sow, and one who keeps his eyes on
the clouds will never reap" (Ecclesiastes 11:4)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: mathew <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 23:20:44 -0400

> it. I'll sign up and consider my spam problem solved.

Yes, this strikes me as exactly the right model.

People I know get to mail me for free.  Everyone else has to pay a fee 
*I* set if they want to contact me.  I'll call it "postage" in the 
discussion below, for want of a better word.

People sending mail would sign up with a postage provider. There could 
be many of these, just like there are many online banks and payment 
systems. I imagine that people like PayPal would add Internet postage 
as a part of their system, in fact.

The system receiving mail for me would check to see if the person's in 
my address book. If not, it would check for postage--that is, it would 
check my account to see that the appropriate amount had been credited. 
No postage, and either my mail server bounces it, or passes it through 
with a flag so I can choose what to do.

[Maybe valid postage means they get added to my address book, so they 
only have to pay once.]

 From the sender end, the way it would work is that a Postage 
Requirements Server would be resolved, much the same way as an MX is 
resolved, based on my e-mail address. Their client would contact the 
Postage Requirements Server, tell it their e-mail address, and it would 
reply with how much postage I want from them before I'll accept their 
mail. They'd then make a decision whether to use their postage provider 
to send me the money along with the e-mail, or not. Once their system 
confirmed that postage had been sent, they'd send the actual e-mail 
with an appropriate header indicating postage was paid.

What's in it for the end user? Well, apart from going a long way 
towards solving the spam problem, most people could probably fund their 
occasional need for outgoing postage from the proceeds of incoming junk 
mail, and still make a profit.

What's in it for the people deploying it? Money! Postage providers 
(sending and receiving) could charge a penny on every piece of non-zero 
digital postage. These fees would be taken into account when the 
sender's client contacted the Postage Requirements Server.

Transaction charges for the real-world transfer of the money would be 
minimized by rolling up the transactions at the end of each month, just 
like Amazon rolls up my tip jar transactions into one deposit, Paypal 
rolls up my transactions into one bank credit or debit, the Apple Music 
Store rolls up my track purchases into one bill, and so on.

I imagine ICANN or some such organization would keep a limit on the 
number of postage providers, enough to allow competition and keep rates 
low, but not so many that the market would be fragmented and 
transaction costs make it unprofitable.

As long as we had a list of "official" postage providers you wouldn't 
need any fancy cryptography; just SSL connections. Sender client 
contacts postage provider, gives it details of my account and amount to 
send. My mail client contacts my provider, checks amounts received and 
e-mail addresses or message IDs to whitelist. The providers would need 
to know about each other, and agree to interoperate, much like domain 
registries do.

Another nice feature would be zero cost postage for friends. That would 
prevent spammers from being able to break through by sending e-mail 
pretending to be from someone I know, as my system would check for a 
zero-cost stamp and only allow through the right message IDs, yet at 
the same time my friends wouldn't have to pay money to e-mail me.

As far as I can see, something like this can be built using technology 
available today. Although eventually client support would be added, 
initially it could be done using a web interface to your postage 
provider to pay to get you added to my address book, on the "pay once" 
model. The receiving server needs to know enough HTTP and SSL to do the 
equivalent of a PayPal account query, but that's about it.

In fact, I'm rather surprised nobody has built something like this 
already. It seems pretty obvious. Maybe there's some massive flaw I'm 
missing, hence this e-mail. I'm sure if anyone can nit-pick the idea to 
death, it's the people on this list...

mathew

---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 09:26:31 -0400

At 11:20 PM -0400 5/25/03, mathew wrote:
>People I know get to mail me for free.  Everyone else has to pay a 
>fee *I* set if they want to contact me.  I'll call it "postage" in 
>the discussion below, for want of a better word.

The problem with this is that it flips the identity problem on its 
head.  Now instead of everyone wanting to know the identity of the 
spammer, the advertisers will all want to know the identity of the 
recipient.  (As in, what actual person is behind the email address.) 
They'll want this, at the very least, to avoid fraud.  Because all of 
a sudden the economics are reversed.  There will be groups of people 
doing the exact inverse of spammers.  They'll be registering lots of 
domains, signing up for lots of sites, and then raking in the money.

>already. It seems pretty obvious. Maybe there's some massive flaw 
>I'm missing, hence this

Why should they?  For the most part legitimate advertisers get 
through fine and free.  And like most of these systems, it all 
depends on how good your whitelisting system is.  I certainly can't 
reject email based on whether someone is in my address book, so at 
the very least it goes into a hold queue where I scan it.  And that's 
all the spammers need.  So they can continue to send spam.  So what 
have we gained?
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

---

From: Mitch Wagner <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 12:26:14 -0700

Paying people to read advertisements was tried a few times during the 
dotcom boom, and the business model failed every time.

The reason is that there's two kinds of people on the Internet: the ones 
with too much time and not enough money, and the ones with enough money but 
not enough time.

The second group, the ones with enough money, are the ones that advertisers 
want to reach -- they're the ones with money to spend on luxuries and 
things, right? But, unfortunately, just about everybody with enough money 
doesn't have enough time to do everything they want to do. They certainly 
don't have enough time to sit through advertisements, not for the 
pennies-per-ad that an advertiser can afford to pay.

The group with enough time to sit through ads are people who don't have any 
money to spend on stuff. They're unemployed, and students, and other people 
who access the Internet from third-hand Pentium MMX machines at home or 
from PCs at the public library. They'll sit through as many advertisements 
as people will throw at them, so long as they get paid to do it -- but 
advertisers aren't interested in reaching THEM.

(There's a third group, people who don't have enough time OR enough money. 
They're working two or three jobs just to get by. But they don't figure 
into this discussion -- they've heard of this "Internet" thing and keep 
thinking they should give it a try.)

Mitch Wagner