> its value relies in forcing manual labor on initial key exchange Setting up NNTP peers has always been manual, and one has always gotten one's newsfeed throu

> its value relies in forcing manual labor on initial key exchange Setting up NNTP peers has always been manual, and one has always gotten one's newsfeed through one's peers which is why this can work; as your edit noted, this can't work for SMTP because it's a different model. > If I get your key and start signing spam with it, sending it all over the place, you'll soon be overflowed by "yo!"s, you'll have to regenerate keys, rebuild trust (a process you've forced to be slow), and your mail won't go through for days or weeks. And for NNTP that would be okay. Solving the SMTP spam problem is something else entirely, and I wouldn't want to taken on that burden. But Usenet could have been saved.