On Sat, 16 Aug 2025 17:24:04 -0700, Michael Thomas via NANOG wrote:
Barry has been going on about this idea for decades, I think. It wouldn't work then, it won't work now.
Until some idea suddenly works. Or an old idea becomes feasible. Frankly, many things we take for granted today would not exist with that "won't work" attitude. The better question (imho) to Barry is: how is your idea different from the already existing proposals? Barry has a reasonable theory - that the economics of spamming is brittle - but it is just that: a theory. And most of the (failed) proposals seem academic and avoid actual "costs" in terms of money. Or raise the real-world costs for everyone, if you need CPU cycles to participate in the email system. So Barry stepping out of this box and suggesting real economics as a factor is not unreasonable. I am not sure if there are more concrete details though (?).
Nobody can put up a coherent argument for why the current cat and mouse situation isn't the acceptable balance,
I guess "acceptable" can be defined as: Hey, I can always get a free personal account with gmail. And as a company I pay Google or Microsoft, save money on my IT staff. And good luck blocking "me" (i.e. Google, Microsoft). Maybe a problem if you are in the email business, fine with me, my domain is a private hobby. In fact, for all their "flaws", seeing the insanity of the know-it-all experts (some here on the list) I think I prefer Google requesting some reputation steps and a webpage explaining it. The alternative: being blocked for "Excessive Spam - Come back when you have fixed it". No further details. Sure, private domain, private VPS, no BL/score listing that I can find ... fortunately that blocking was just a Cc: to one of my posts, so I could not care less. The acceptable state of the mail system today! So there you may have an argument: that the increasing number of mechanisms, lists, tricks make the mail system less work-able and more broken. But I have no crystal ball, if email will finally break or will keep going - I don't know. Would be just sad if it breaks (but I have a gmail account as a backup ;-) Marc