Subject: [Asrg] About that e-postage draft [POSTAGE]

From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Jan 2009 12:37:02 -0000

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-irtf-asrg-postage-00

Since then I haven't heard a peep about it.  Since this is
the asRg, the least we could do would be to try to do another
version that adds some discussion of where it might be used and
what the deployment issues are.

R's,
John
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From: John Leslie <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:44:02 -0500

> 
> About a month ago, some ASRG members published this draft:
> 

   I hardly think all that needs to be in the draft...

   Nonetheless, we have perhaps been too quiet about it.

   Usage, of course, _could_ be on every email transaction. If the
extension were implemented for the popular open-source MTAs, widespread
adoption would be feasible. (Of course, any actual exchange of value
would require a "banking" structure: Ben April is working on that, but
I haven't asked him for a progress report.)

   I don't believe it appropriate to tie asrg-postage to any particular
"banking" structure. It needs only to deal with transfer of opaque
tokens between MTAs. I have jokingly suggested we do an inital deployment
using Zimbabwean dollars -- which nobody in his right mind could actually
want to redeem. ;^)

   One side of deployment is getting at least one commonly-used MTA to
implement it. I am trying to entice college students into doing that.
Another side of deployment is getting at least one party to put some
(currency) value into the system. A bit counter-intuitively, that part
looks easy: many mass-emailers would happily pay some small fraction of
snail-mail postage to get past spam-filtering (which silently drops
their "crucially-important" emails).

   It's important to understand that any real "banking" system is
going to deal in "settlements" -- only exchanging actual value between
banks based on the net differences of transactions. Thus, recipients'
banks will accumulate value as mass-emailers add it to their banks,
leaving recipients' MTAs' accounts with a surplus "too small to redeem"
available for paying "postage" on their outgoing emails that might
get caught in spam-filters.

   So long as mass-email remains well over 50% of email, there's no
need for average ISPs to put any net value into email postage!

   I think that's enough exposition for one email. There are bunches
of research topics in how to set postage rates, and maybe how to
shame larger ISPs into actually "paying", which I'd be happy to
discuss in _other_ emails.

--
John Leslie <[email-masked]>
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From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: 23 Jan 2009 00:35:12 -0000

>   I hardly think all that needs to be in the draft...

We're a research group -- if you want to do standards track, the IETF
is right down the hall.  I think it would be quite useful to have
something that describes a well thought out e-postage system, and all
the reasons it failed.

R's,
John