On 8/16/25 4:42 PM, Matthew Petach via NANOG wrote:
On Sat, Aug 16, 2025 at 4:10 PM John R. Levine via NANOG < nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
On Sat, 16 Aug 2025, bzs@theworld.com wrote:
"Electronic postage stamps" are one possible approach and might become the general term for whatever resource management is adopted.
But as a phrase it's too limiting and evokes certain counter-arguments as people stand up straw men and knock them down just based on those three words. It's a great idea if you wave away all of the practical questions like who's going to issue the postage, who's going to collect it, who's going to pay for the infrastructure to do the checking, and who's going to settle the claims when a crook breaks into your ISP and sends $10,000 worth of spam using your stamps.
My preferred solution is a mandatory button in each e-mail message that administers a small electric shock to the sender. Each individual shock would be no big deal but when thousands of people hit the button the cumulative effect would be painful or for big time spammers, fatal. It's sort of like the old Bonded Sender idea but with electricity. I have no idea how to implement that either, but people who claim it can't work are just opposed to creative, innovative ideas.
"Electronic Postage Stamps" conjures up visions of a centralized Post Office type entity that issues postage.
Barry has been going on about this idea for decades, I think. It wouldn't work then, it won't work now. Nobody can put up a coherent argument for why the current cat and mouse situation isn't the acceptable balance, rather than some FUSSP that will never happen. Spam filtering is just a cost of business like electricity. You'd probably save more by addressing that with dilithium crystals, or something. Mike