Anytime anyone sends a mail to my server, I want to be paid 2 cents.

And then, no one will want to send _you_ email. Spam or otherwise.

You would also want to be able to accept mail from certain senders for free.

Which I guess is how you would avoid killing off legitimate mass mailing (like nanog).... And would that be set up sort of like peering? So instead of just major network's peering with other major networks, all of the sudden everyone running a mail server has to work out "peering" (clearly a different type, but I think you would see a lot of the same mess, with people setting their own requirements, etc) with everyone else who runs a mail server that you regularly get mail from. I gather that peering negotiations are difficult, even between the large networks - can you imagine what a mess this would be? ack! Of course, the flip side is that if I begin a business that runs a email service that won't charge to receive mail, then I might be operating at a competitive advantage for attracting business customers (generally an attractive demographic) who don't want people to have to pay in order to contact them. So you end up with either no isp willing to implement your system, or with them having to run parallel mail systems - one free, one fee.

What I envision is some sort of micropayment protocol extension to SNMP. something like you exchange helo's, mail from, and rcpt to's, and the receiving server says to the sender "That will be x cents please", at which point the server sends some sort of cert-signed digital cash.

A downside of this - if you're able to implement this, then it becomes trivial to impose some kind of an "email tax". While that would be unpopular, once you start charging people for email, adding on 1 more cent as tax, no big deal, right? etc. etc. etc. I think you'd quickly see taxes here and a lot of other places on the net, as a result. IMHO, that would be a bad outcome.

I'm not sure how you would bootstrap this or if it will ever be possible. I just think that if we could get even $0.02 per email from the spammers a lot of them would stop.

I think you'd be throwing the baby out with the bath water here. Yes you'd kill spam, but you'd kill a lot more, too. And I think you'd quickly find that the cost of administrating this system and dealing with the billing and agreements and disputes would take up as much or more time that is spent now on spam. Clearly the current system (blacklists, etc) for dealing with spam isn't perfect. But it is evolving - and if more jurisdictions in the US started putting laws on the books that made it easier to track down, and shut down spammers and people (isp's) that knowingly provide them service, that it will be possible to cut out most of the spam without going to drastic measures like this.

On Sat, May 04, 2002 at 06:28:56AM -0400, Scott A Crosby wrote:

[1] This raises an interesting question of how can you claim an email costs $.02 to receive, when the bandwidth to get it is about 3 orders of magnitude less, and diskspace costs 2 orders of magnitude less ($10/gig)?

If your average user gets 10 emails/day, that means that each user gets 300 emails/month, and costs you $6.00 in resources?

You need to keep in mind the cost of disk space. And you can not use the el-cheapo 5400 rpm ide disks as your price model either. While in a smaller environment they work fine. (read: my home mail server), if you're running a commercial isp, you need higher data transfer rates.

If you have dialup users paying $20/month, do you kick them off if they subscribe to a busyish mailing list and get over 35 emails/day?

If they don't fetch their e-mail in a reasonable amount of time I have known isps to delete the mail. My employer has given me an earthlink account for when I travel to dial-up. I don't check that mail there. I don't expect them to keep all the spam that might accumulate so in 3 years from now when I decide to pop-3 in for the fun of it, i download a few gigs of spam.

In terms of ISP resources, emails cannot be costing $.02 each to receive.

I'm not entirely supporting that figure but not disputing it. You need to keep in mind: 1) Disk space costs. You need to have a reasonable disk space system set up for any moderate-large sized isp. This includes 10krpm scsi disks as well as raid including backups. (Your customer John doesn't want to lose his e-mail from Aunt Sally). 2) not everyone reads their mailbox realtime or locally. While the average ISP customer is online more and more time a month and cable modems and other services have increased their ability to fetch their e-mail in more frequency, you may have to store mail for up to 2 weeks for the average user. (anything over that they're out of the country I suspect and not interested in their e-mail). 3) the cost of the bits over transit/peering are low enough that most people don't count them, they are very low as compared to the cost of disk space/cpu and ram required to handle massive amounts of e-mail in a reasonable/prompt manner, but they do exist. One will need to invest in a seperate ethernet switch and other devices to help keep the traffic segmented. this is a component of the cost of an isp providing smtp service.

In terms of the time to delete them, I could believe that they cost $.02 each. (If you value your time at $20/hour, $.02 is 3 seconds)

an ISP with about 250k customers needs many gigs of disk space to hold their mail and about 10-15 servers to process it. As the spam increases, the number of servers required will go up because you have to process those smtp connections. There are also the technology costs of building a smtp system that can handle such a large environment. I (continue to) see mail as the #1 reason people connect to the internet. It's fast and reliable. If your provider has only one link out and it's down, you can still get/deliver your mail (assuming they don't have a poorly designed network) and it will reach its destination. This is also why people complain more about the ads they receive as compared to the ones that they view on websites. They understand the difference between making the outbound request for info and expecting to get some noise as compared to saying "give me the messages directed at me". They don't want the noise in their personal messages but in the public space they are less sensitive. - Jared -- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.