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A little off-topic, but this makes me wonder... what if sending email required a very small amount of currency (crypto or fiat) to be sent to escrow. If the rec

A little off-topic, but this makes me wonder... what if sending email required a very small amount of currency (crypto or fiat) to be sent to escrow. If the receiver decides the email was unsolicited or unwelcome, you would lose that currency (burn it or redistribute it amongst everyone participating). The value can even be small enough to be inconsequential to individuals but costly for high-volume spam.

zeptonix 5y ago
Sounds like an idea for a new coin, TBH
duskwuff 5y ago
This has been proposed many, many times. It's infeasible for a multitude of reasons. One of those is that it would allow any web service which sends an email to a user-specified address -- even a single email used to verify an account, which is standard practice -- to be abused to bankrupt the service operator.
- jszymborski 5y ago
  Nothing new under the sun, I guess :P That's interesting, though. The attack would require the collusion of many parties. That's very feasible if you consider how easy it is to create email addresses today. One could imagine the system requires a one-time registration fee orders of magnitude greater than the spam penalty. That wouldn't be a solution on it's own, but pair that with delays in applying penalties and an arbitrage system and I think we're looking at an increasingly stable system but with ballooning complexity. Don't know if it's practical, and as you've mentioned I'm sure many people have gone down that road, but I'll be daydreaming about it for the next little bit :)
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    > The attack would require the collusion of many parties. Not sure what parties you have in mind here. As far as I'm aware, it would only require the involvement of a single party entering a bunch of fake or scraped email addresses into a registration form. The malicious party wouldn't receive any benefit, but the web site operator would have their funds drained. > One could imagine the system requires a one-time registration fee orders of magnitude greater than the spam penalty. Requiring every online service which sends emails to charge users to register would be disastrous. It would make entire classes of web sites (like hobbyist forums, or even free trials of paid services) infeasible to operate.
- rickydroll 5y ago
  not necessarily. Even in my prototype sender pays email environment (camram/2 penny blue), the cost of the stamp was pushed on the message originator i.e. the email client. The mail server delivering the mail to another server on the Internet doesn't need to take that message if it doesn't have postage. There are a few other ideas the project explored including using captive zombie nets generating postage for a company's email using spare cycles on desktops. Truth be told, whole distributed postage stamp generating model looked a hell of a lot like bitcoin mining.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    > Even in my prototype sender pays email environment (camram/2 penny blue), the cost of the stamp was pushed on the message originator i.e. the email client. What email client? The one internal to the web application?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
gsich 5y ago
Sounds like Hashcash. Could work, but not if noboby implements it.

zeptonix 5y ago

Sounds like an idea for a new coin, TBH

duskwuff 5y ago

This has been proposed many, many times. It's infeasible for a multitude of reasons. One of those is that it would allow any web service which sends an email to a user-specified address -- even a single email used to verify an account, which is standard practice -- to be abused to bankrupt the service operator.

jszymborski 5y ago
Nothing new under the sun, I guess :P That's interesting, though. The attack would require the collusion of many parties. That's very feasible if you consider how easy it is to create email addresses today. One could imagine the system requires a one-time registration fee orders of magnitude greater than the spam penalty. That wouldn't be a solution on it's own, but pair that with delays in applying penalties and an arbitrage system and I think we're looking at an increasingly stable system but with ballooning complexity. Don't know if it's practical, and as you've mentioned I'm sure many people have gone down that road, but I'll be daydreaming about it for the next little bit :)
- duskwuff 5y ago
  > The attack would require the collusion of many parties. Not sure what parties you have in mind here. As far as I'm aware, it would only require the involvement of a single party entering a bunch of fake or scraped email addresses into a registration form. The malicious party wouldn't receive any benefit, but the web site operator would have their funds drained. > One could imagine the system requires a one-time registration fee orders of magnitude greater than the spam penalty. Requiring every online service which sends emails to charge users to register would be disastrous. It would make entire classes of web sites (like hobbyist forums, or even free trials of paid services) infeasible to operate.
rickydroll 5y ago
not necessarily. Even in my prototype sender pays email environment (camram/2 penny blue), the cost of the stamp was pushed on the message originator i.e. the email client. The mail server delivering the mail to another server on the Internet doesn't need to take that message if it doesn't have postage. There are a few other ideas the project explored including using captive zombie nets generating postage for a company's email using spare cycles on desktops. Truth be told, whole distributed postage stamp generating model looked a hell of a lot like bitcoin mining.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  > Even in my prototype sender pays email environment (camram/2 penny blue), the cost of the stamp was pushed on the message originator i.e. the email client. What email client? The one internal to the web application?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

gsich 5y ago

Sounds like Hashcash. Could work, but not if noboby implements it.