Subject: on UCE: Possible Interest (fwd)

From: Rick Wesson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2002 20:48:04 -0700 (PDT)

Its folks like these that also contribute to the spam problem. I
still recieve too much spam and the only true way out is if we develop a
way for the sender to pay for the processing of their messages, once its
not "free" to send maybe the traffic will show down.

Its time for postage stamps for email.

-rick

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2002 23:36:47 -0400
From: Tom <[email-masked]>
To: .@
Subject: Possible Interest

Good Day,

I represent an acquisition firm that purchases the e-mail
subscribers of websites that go defunct.

We have access to several databases full of individuals
who are double opt-in subscribers of newsletters and
online offers. We sell off these user bases at 10-15cents.

If interested, please let me know what category of
interest you would like, and i'll let you know what
currently available assets we have.

Thank You
Thomas M Samco
Independent Rep
MSR Inc.

---

From: Jan Meijer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 10:26:33 +0200 (W. Europe Daylight Time)

> Its time for postage stamps for email.

That makes email expensive for all, whereas we want to make it expensive
for spammers.  On a more practical note: what amount should be charged and
how will you explain the charge to people when they know that email is not
that costly.

Jan

---

From: Donald Eastlake 3rd <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 09:22:59 -0400 (EDT)

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Jan Meijer wrote:

> Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 10:26:33 +0200 (W. Europe Daylight Time)
> From: Jan Meijer <[email-masked]>
> To: Rick Wesson <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: on UCE: Possible Interest (fwd)
>

The cost is be set by the recipient. They maintain a white list of
people / mailing lists that can send them mail without charge. They get
to choose whether to trust the From address or require mail to be
digitally signed to qualify for white list treatment or allow free mail
if a special password header is present or whatever. Almost all mailing
lists would refuse to pay so if you don't set them up on your white
list, you won't get mail from them. Spam is unsolicited and won't match
anyone on the whitelist and bulk so it will be too expensive for the
spammer. All this is obvious.

And its fairly simple from a protocol point of view but enormously
difficult in terms of deployment, payment infrastructure, etc. In fact,
a hash token scheme where you pay in computrons and which would be less
effective but avoids the payment infrastructure problems is probably a
necessary step on the way to such a final system.

> how will you explain the charge to people when they know that email is not

One word: "spam".

> Jan

Donald

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 13:35:45 -0400

> if a special password header is present or whatever. Almost all mailing

Been a while since you worked a help desk, huh? :)

An amazingly large percentage of users have trouble understanding the
"please reply to this message to confirm your subscription" mail that is
sent by most popular mailing list management software.

For that matter, an even more amazing number of these "please reply" messages
bounce because the user didn't configure their OWN e-mail address correctly
(today's favorite - John...Smith@mail..domain...com who obviously needs to
debounce that '.' key ;)

And you want them to cut-and-paste the list address into a form AND get
all the right options set too?  I think you're giving the users too much
credit for possessing operational neurons....
-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Senior Engineer
				Virginia Tech

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 13:50:57 -0600 (MDT)

> From: [email-masked]

> ...

For the purposes of fighting spam, users who cannot reply to email
matter less than those who can.  If there were no users that would
reply to email, then the only contact information in spam would
be telephone numbers and postal addresses.  That a lot of spam
includes email addresses and various URLs shows that the situation
with legitimate subscription confirmations is not at all bad.

The most you might conclude is that more mailing list and auto-whitelisting
software should adopt mechanisms common in spam, such as mailto URLs
that encode the confirming token in the subject or the destination
address.  Most of the users who can't figure out how to cut and paste
or reply to mail are also dumb enough to us "web enabled" MUAs.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Donald Eastlake 3rd <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 20:49:06 -0400 (EDT)

If spam really isn't a problem, then the efforts involved in ultimately
engineering a real solution, which in my opinion has to use economic
forces, and the efforts involved in engineering easy user interfaces,
will not be worth it.

If spam really is a problem and is exponentially leading to email
becoming unusable in most cases, then these engineering efforts are
worth it and if the protocol aspects are not done in a standard manner,
they will be done in proprietary ways.

Some systems that would like to be closed would probably be delighted to
provide a control whereby their users can very simply and very easily
decided binarily whether they are connected to outside Internet mail or
not, hoping that any foolish enough to choose to be connected will find
their mailbox overflowing with so much spam so quickly that they will be
driven back to only allowing communication with others in the closed
system.

Alternatively, if a user can't or won't configure any whitelist and
their system just defaults to charging, say, 5 cents for each incoming
email, and this behaviour were common, what would the effect be? If most
spam went away, their cost for sending mail would be approximately
cancelled by their income from receiving mail. Even if they never
receive mail and send 5 messages a day, you are only talking about less
than $8 a month. Whatever residual spam there was would respresent an
income stream for them or their ISP. They wouldn't be able to subscribe
to mailing lists (unless the mailing list operator went to a bunch of
work and allowed people to pay for subscription to cover the delivery
costs) but how bad is that? Better than email becoming worthless, I'd
say. And how hard would it really be to have a good user interface for
just whitelisting mailing lists?

This is a complex space. I've always said it would be enormously
difficult to deploy such a system. But I'm also not impressed by glib
responses claiming its completely impossible because of user interface
problems.  Even if that were true for 95% of users, which I don't
accept, it seems to me it would be better to have email be useful for 5%
of users than for 0%.

Donald
======================================================================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd                       [email-masked]
 155 Beaver Street              +1-508-634-2066(h) +1-508-851-8280(w)
 Milford, MA 01757 USA                   [email-masked]

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 [email-masked] wrote:

> Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 13:35:45 -0400
> To: Donald Eastlake 3rd <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked]

---

From: Larry Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 20:23:16 -0500

> forces, and the efforts involved in engineering easy user interfaces,

How very true.  Until it becomes "economically" un-profitable to send spam, 
it will continue to both be a problem - and a growing one...

> they will be done in proprietary ways.

True again....

<< cut>>
>  They wouldn't be able to subscribe
> costs) but how bad is that? 
<<cut>>

Actually I think you would see "lists" going to "web" based (html) which 
would not require them to "send" anything through/to your servers/system.

>
> This is a complex space. I

Very true...

-- 
Larry Smith
SysAd ECSIS.NET
[email-masked]

---

From: "Eric A. Hall" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 21:20:25 -0500

on 8/19/2002 8:23 PM Larry Smith wrote:

> How very true.  Until it becomes "economically" un-profitable to send
> spam, it will continue to both be a problem - and a growing one...

Unfortunately, experience with Usenet has already proven this to be false.
Instead, new idiots are born everyday, each of whom think that there are
millions of potential customers out there just dying to hear about their
pyramid schemes, web sites and lotions.

It's a social problem, not an economic problem.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/

---

From: "Eric A. Hall" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 01:04:51 -0500

on 8/19/2002 7:49 PM Donald Eastlake 3rd wrote:

> email, and this behaviour were common, what would the effect be?

The effect would be squat. Since I like you, I'll escort you down three
different logic trees for this.

First of all, a 5c per-recipient fee is 29c cheaper than postal mail. If
you were a marketer with a mailing to spew, which would you choose? In the
end, if cost were our only weapon, the only fee that would make people NOT
prefer spam would be a fee that was higher than the postal equivalent,
since the automated handling of spam is still significantly cheaper than
envelope stuffing and meter-feeding management. Frankly, a fee that high
would simply force the abandonment of email. People would move to ICQ or
whatever instead, and they would do it fast. The spammers would follow
them there, and the root problem would not have been solved.

Secondarily, even though a fee structure would likely cause many of the
less savory spammers to stop spewing, it would also legitimize spam for
mainstream outfits (it would have a public fee structure, acting as an
admission gate for socially acceptable behavior). There are about 20
million official businesses in the US alone. If only .1% of them sent a
single message every month -- "hi, don't forget us when it comes time to
buy widgets" -- that's 20,000 such notices per month. Again, we would have
simply accelerated the abandonment of mail.

In the end, we have to treat this like any other kind of trespassing, and
legislation is the only thing that will do it. Why don't these same idiots
go around parking lots, putting bumper stickers on people cars? Why
haven't we passed laws saying that ~"anybody can put a bumper sticker on
anybody's car for 5c"? It's the same issue.

---

From: Einar Stefferud <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 00:36:38 -0700

This thread is missing a key element to the way we all pay for our 
use of the Internet.

This latest proposal to set up a clearing system to settle payments 
among senders and receivers would put the Internet back in the 
Telecom era of billing settlements, where we learned that the 
customer's cost of phone service was loaded with 70% allocated to 
billing and settlement system operations.

Going back there suggests that our ISP services will cost everyone 
(repeat:  EVERYONE) 100/30 = 3.33333 times as much as now.  I suggest 
it is not worth this much as a spam cure.  Especially since all this 
extra expense goes to our green eye shade friends in the billing 
departments.

For one, we all pay for all the mail we send, and receive, from some 
mystical midpoint between the sender and the receiver.  It is 
inherent in the business models of ISPs, which charge me (and you , 
and you , and you, and all) for all traffic of all kinds from me to 
the mystical middle of every connection caused by me and every 
connection accepted by me.

The "mystical middle" is really not a mystery to understand;  It is 
just impossible to always know where it is.  First, think in terms of 
local phone calls:

If I call someone on a "local" number, we both pay for half of the 
call with our flat rate charge for local service.  If I make a lot 
more calls that you make, my rate/call is obviously less, but we are 
both paying our share of every call, none the less.

But, if I make a non-local call I get to pay time and charges on my 
end, and the phone company has to share those charges with the 
delivering phone system, which is the root cause of settlement 
payments, just because all the charges are collected on one end, or 
the other, but not split between sender and receiver as in the 
Internet.

So, In the Internet, what I am calling the mystical middle is that 
point between us where our different ISPs hand off to each other as 
peers, which tends for many connections to be somewhere in the realm 
of the primary level backbone IP networks, which service lower level 
ISP on some traffic volume basis (other then peering).

Thus, the logic of peering is that the backbone IP carriers are 
getting paid for all traffic in both directions by their customers, 
and thus there is no such thing as a need to "settle".

And there is no directional volume differential to argue about. 
There is no easy way to balance traffic in both directions in any 
case, because most protocols call for unbalanced traffic.  Email is 
mostly outbound from senders, and incoming for receivers.  WEB 
surfing is just the reverse.

The only people hurt by spam then are those who pay by the minute for 
their receiving traffic, so these people would like to have an ISP 
that offers them a way to filter incoming traffic for spam, and other 
unwanted mail.

It has taken many of the IP backbone carriers a long long time to 
figure all this "no settlement stuff" out, though it has been clear 
to many of us for many years now.   The Old Bell Heads took a long 
time to figure it out.

The people who care most about spam are those who pay some fee by the 
minute for downloading mail they do not want to receive.  I expect 
they would like their ISPs to offer them POP and IMAP accounts that 
can filter out the spam with Black and White filter lists.  But, the 
black and white lists need to be controlled by the ISP customer, not 
by the ISP.

Those of us with DSL or better service do not so much care about spam 
wasting bandwidth, but we are bothered by needing to sort through the 
cruddy spam.  So, an arrangement where I get to bill a bunch of 
unknown spammers 5 cents per message is not worth using because they 
are not going to pay those bills in any case, and I am not going to 
spend money on suing them in China or Russia to get paid.

So, here is what I do.   Building the filters is manual as I do it now.
I have invested in about 700 filters, many of which are now obsolete, 
so I figured out a better way to do it with black and white filter 
sets.

I have a white list and a black list.  My white list has specific 
accepting EMail addresses in it, and the filters do me the favor of 
filing all mail into a more or less correct folders.  The few that 
land in the wrong folder get moved without a lot of problems.  Beats 
dumping it all into one INBOX for manual sorting, since I only need 
to deal with the misses, which are much fewer than dumping it all in 
the inbox.

My black list has mostly domain names that match domain names, or 
something rather general that catches huge chunks of the Internet. 
YAHOO.COM, MSN.NET, CN.NET, NET.CN, COM.RS, EXCITE.NET, 
EARTHLINK.NET, MINDSPRING.NET, etc, ad nauseum.

So, my inbox stays rather clean of spam.  I don't remember the last 
time spam got to my inbox.

The downside is that I also need to scan the trash folder for the 
rejected stuff in case I have missed someone in my white list, or 
someone changes their address, or something.  But, it is interesting 
how obvious the good stuff is in a list of mostly spam.  I hope that 
someone one day builds a Mail User Agent system with these kinds of 
tools to help users build such a system.

I do not strongly recommend that everyone do what I do, but with a 
little thought, I am sure you can think of something like it that 
will be vastly less bother than trying to collect nickels from 
spammers;-)...

I know of only one guy that actually collected $50.00 from some 
unfortunate spammer that used a valid From address, and became 
convinced that paying was better than getting a summons for a lot 
more money based on the Washington State Spam Law, and possibly being 
put out of his lucrative spamming business.  At his hourly rate, the 
$50.00 of found money fell short of covering his time;-)...

So, forget all this business of solving the spam problems with 5 cent charges.
At $10.00/message, you still cannot make such a scheme work, so 
filtering is the only answer.

Let's hope that our Mail User Agents and our POP Mail Servers can 
find ways to implement some really useful black & white list filters 
that we can directly control through desktop of web server interfaces 
with good security components.

Among other things, they should provide scannable logs with rich 
search tools that identify what filter caused which message to land 
somewhere.

There might be some room for also doing some IETF work on defining 
some standard headers to support smarter filtering, but I have no 
suggestions for this.  The problem is to get the spammers to use them 
correctly;-)...

Cheers...\Stef