On Sat, 4 May 2002, Forrest W. Christian wrote:
On Sat, 4 May 2002 measl@mfn.org wrote:
How about something along the lines of dial accounts having their outgoing SMTP connections rate limited to, oh, let's say 100 per day, and limiting the maximum number of recipients on any given email to some low number, say 5?
A customer reaches the limit, the account auto-rejects all email for 24 hours.
Someone bitches? Let them buy full rate dedicated services, with the first month, last month, and a security deposit up front before service is established.
The problem with this is how do you enforce this across thousands of mail servers, controlled by many many different organizations?
I'm not saying the pay-per-message option is perfect. In fact, the more I think about a camram-type solution the more I like it: where the sender proves to the recipient that they spent a fair bit of CPU time before sending the message.
It doesn't scale to those who source lots of email, like mailing lists or webmail providers. It also has its own set of problems that are much much worse, if its enabled by default on users: -- [1] User (to ISP): ``Why does getting mail from NANOG never seem to work.'' Response: ``Because you haven't enabled them in the no-pay list.'' [2] User (to mailing list admin): ``Whenever I try to subscribe, I don't get a confirmation message.'' Response: ``Because you haven't enabled them in the no-pay list.'' [3] User (to ISP): ``Why does email from grandma never get through.'' Response: ``Because their email client doesn't support CAMRAM and you haven't enabled them in the no-pay list.'' [4] User (to ISP): ``Why does email to grandma never get through.'' Response: ``You need a CAMRAM-aware email client. Switch from MS-Outlook to Mutt.'' -- I dunno, but I'd think that the tech-support manpower for this would be pricy, especially if you get a phone call everytime a user tries to subscribe to mailing list. Spam sucks... But, these alternatives seem like they'd be a lot more expensive for ISP's.
The bottom line is that in my opinion people need to give up *something* for the privlege of sending mail. I suggested a couple of cents per message. Others reject this as "it will destroy the net". Camram requires people to give up CPU cycles. This might be an easier thing to swallow.
Imagine a requirement that you had to listen to 30 seconds of muzak before every telephone call. Somewhere in the 30 seconds would be a 4 digit number you'd have to type in in order to complete the call. This is done to make sure people ``give up *something* for the privlege of'' making a telephone call. Why is this done, other than to discourage people from making telephone calls? Dunno.. Are telephone calls something we need to discourage?
Passing laws and putting on filters don't work. Depending on each mail server admin to do the right thing doesn't work. We need to find something else that will.
I hope so too.. But sender-pays isn't true for postal mail or telephone. If I get a junk mail, I have to waste time *and* pay to have it carted to a landfill. If I get a phone-spam, I have to waste time. In ways, it seems like this is trying to force email into the idealized mold of postal mail. A mold that never really existed in the first place. This is impossible in any case as email isn't postal mail. Where is the analogy of NANOG for postal mail? A weekly newsletter? That newsletter would be what? $.35/issue, or $350/week if it had a readership of 1000. How much cheaper is NANOG to run than what that newsletter would cost? We could make a NANOG posting cost $20/message for sender-pays, but do we want to sacrifice mailing lists on the alter of fitting a square peg into a circular hole? Scott