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Why is it a problem if legitimate email costs $0.01? If it's not even worth that to you, perhaps it's not so "legitimate" after all. (Organization internal mail

by jwatte 12y ago

Why is it a problem if legitimate email costs $0.01? If it's not even worth that to you, perhaps it's not so "legitimate" after all. (Organization internal mail doesn't need to pay itself) The main casualty would be mailing lists, which would likely have to move to forums or subscriptions. It might be technically possible to also say "I accept mail from X without demanding payment" but that's not necessary to make a pay-for email market work, and have much less spam.

ewillbefull 12y ago
$0.01 is just arbitrary. Some people might find that too expensive, and some spammers might find it cheap enough to profit from anyway. The problem is that the threshold for affordability is in NO way attached to the profit margins of spammers, let alone the true value of the email. And your last point is really just a specialized form of a web of trust anyway.
dredmorbius 12y ago
The usual objection is mailing lists. A large list may have hundreds, thousands, and potentially millions of recipients (though I'm not aware of any such at present). The Debian Project provides email subscription stats, with its biggest list being debian-security-announce, at 34,234 subscribers. That's a cost of $342.34 per message transmitted. https://lists.debian.org/stats/ https://lists.debian.org/stats/ It would also be a large overhead to any system with a large userbase that relied on email based notifications. Facebook's financials put its per-user revenues at around $8-$10/year, which would be completely eaten up at the rate of only 3 emails per user per day. The thing about email is that it's really, really cheap. That's the benefit and the detriment to the system. What you want to do is make the costs asymmetric. Cheap for legitimate and white-hat users, really expensive for the black hats.
- elpool2 12y ago
  Could you combine it with a whitelist system? Email from people on your personal whitelist always makes it through for free while email from strangers always costs $0.01. Anyone signing up for debian's mailing list would just have to click a button to add it to their whitelist, same for anyone wanting to receive email from Facebook.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    My read: not really. Micropayments are too fussy in a whole lot of ways. Though of course, if someone wants to prove me wrong they're free to try it.

by jwatte 12y ago

ewillbefull 12y ago

$0.01 is just arbitrary. Some people might find that too expensive, and some spammers might find it cheap enough to profit from anyway. The problem is that the threshold for affordability is in NO way attached to the profit margins of spammers, let alone the true value of the email. And your last point is really just a specialized form of a web of trust anyway.

dredmorbius 12y ago

The usual objection is mailing lists. A large list may have hundreds, thousands, and potentially millions of recipients (though I'm not aware of any such at present). The Debian Project provides email subscription stats, with its biggest list being debian-security-announce, at 34,234 subscribers. That's a cost of $342.34 per message transmitted. https://lists.debian.org/stats/ https://lists.debian.org/stats/ It would also be a large overhead to any system with a large userbase that relied on email based notifications. Facebook's financials put its per-user revenues at around $8-$10/year, which would be completely eaten up at the rate of only 3 emails per user per day. The thing about email is that it's really, really cheap. That's the benefit and the detriment to the system. What you want to do is make the costs asymmetric. Cheap for legitimate and white-hat users, really expensive for the black hats.

elpool2 12y ago
Could you combine it with a whitelist system? Email from people on your personal whitelist always makes it through for free while email from strangers always costs $0.01. Anyone signing up for debian's mailing list would just have to click a button to add it to their whitelist, same for anyone wanting to receive email from Facebook.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  My read: not really. Micropayments are too fussy in a whole lot of ways. Though of course, if someone wants to prove me wrong they're free to try it.