On Sat, 22 Mar 2003, Steve Schear wrote:
> >Finding a way to collect payments for using the real scarce resource,
> >which is the recipient's time, at prices set by the recipient,
> >has some chance of succeeding. There are of course many ways to fail,
> >but it's at least not doomed from the start.
>
> I concur. The question was never asked of me and I never said I supported
> having required ISP involvement in the pricing and settlement of
> send-pays. I think this should be end-user driven, perhaps supported by
> distributed servers akin to PGP key servers where senders can learn about
> their intended recipient's keys and cost to accept email. This cost can be
> in GHz-seconds for PoW or in some monetary unit once real values are
> practical.
This is different. If sender-pays somehow ends up being "mutt/eudora/outlook asks me to set a payment threshold, and then the pennys roll in", that does defeat most of my problems. It still won't work for a spam fix, but, well, there you go.
I think such an approach will immediately and almost completely eliminate the low value proposition spam, which now predominates our in-boxes, from those using it. (Of course, it will also eliminate some of the non-spam initial contact attempts.) Higher value pitches, legit and otherwise, where the uptake from recipients is likely to be significant from a traditional marketing perspective (i.e. about 1%) will still be there because it still makes economic sense to send the missives.
steve
