Subject: Re: [Asrg] Fwd: Major E-mail Delivery for FTC DNCR Launch

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2003 17:47:22 -0600 (MDT)

>From: Barry Shein <[email-masked]>

>Vernon seems to be having trouble with the subjunctive.
>
>WOULD cost, that's a hypothetical future.
>
>Have you anything of actual value to say to everyone here? Remember,
>this isn't a snippy little bar conversation just between the two of
>us.
>
>You're taking up others' valuable time with the straw men, willful
>misunderstandings, and other sleazy argumentation which I don't think
>is convincing anyone that you're very bright.

My mistake.  I thought you were saying that a mail account costs
$100/month/user.  In re-reading your words in
https://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/asrg/current/msg05793.html
and
https://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/asrg/current/msg05803.html
I still get the impression that you are saying that $100 is not
far from the current situation.  What is the current approximate cost?
Isn't $10-$40 retail price-point for accounts and so how can current
costs be more than $1/month/user?

Yes, this is not a "snippy little bar conversation." It's also not
consciousness raising rallye to get us charged up about fighting spam
by considering how bad things could get if they went 100 times past
the possible.  It's not even a venue to blow off steam from the
frustrations of dealing with spammers.  As such, talk about ISP costs
should related to reality and doomsday scenarios about ISP costs must
be plausible.

It's good that we agree that my model of sender pays in 
https://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/asrg/current/msg05804.html
is a bad idea.  I thought my example was close to your model, but I'm
evidently wrong.  What is your model?  All I know for certain about
it is that it
   - will prevent "$100/mo or more" costs for mail accounts.
   - would have the FTC pay you to deliver those DNC confirmations.

Since we're not wasting everyone's time here, it would be good to 
consider the sender pays model you envision that gets you paid by
the FTC as you said in 
https://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/asrg/current/msg05771.html

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

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---

From: Scott Nelson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 00:15:32 -0700

At 06:40 PM 6/26/03 -0600, Vernon Schryver wrote:
[...]
>
>I think switching to sender pays is impossible, even if it were
>desirable or practical with some other history.  Except in the
>perverted cases where big advertisers pay big sellers of "eyes,"
>there are insurmountable practical problems in authorization,
>authentication, and general accounting.  Sender pays for email
>makes just as much sense as sender-pays-per-IP-packet, which about
>15 years after it was first pushed, makes even less sense. 
>(Yes, I've heard of peering fees and approximations to "settlements".)
>

I've seen many /technically/ workable sender pays variants.
Here's a simple one that bypasses the need for special accounting;
Place a minimum size on a message of 10 Megabytes.
Any message that is too small, is simply rejected with a
"555 message to small, pad to 10,000,000 bytes".

Note that this is backward compatible with most email clients,
since it's relatively easy to attach a 10 meg file,
and does not require 100% adoption before it works.

(If the reader is a fan of some other "sender pays" variant and
 thinks this is silly, consider for a moment why this is silly, 
 but your pet "sender pays" is not.)

Of course, "technically possible" is not the same as "desirable".
Unless both the sender and the receiver perceive strong benefits
to change, the system will not change.  

I /like/ cheap email, and I'm very much opposed to anything which
might change that.  I do not think I'm alone.
I would hazard a guess that if someone tried to increase the price,
say by legislating a tax, that I would use SMTP on a different
port "just amongst my friends" and it wouldn't take long before
those on the "friends" network encompassed the entire internet.

Scott Nelson <[email-masked]>