North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: e-postage yet again, was anybody else been spammed by "no-ip.com" yet?

  • From: John R. Levine
  • Date: Sat May 04 20:21:28 2002
  • Newsgroups: iecc.lists.nanog

>> sounds a bit like www.vanqish.com . But other than that, how
>> would it work for mailing lists like this one?
>
>My solution to this would be for people to be able to select certain
>senders as not being charged.

... which leads to the same problems every e-postage scheme does:

* It swaps the current set of problems for an all-new and quite
  possibly worse set of problems, as bad guys come up with ways to
  scam the per-message payment system.  Just think, get infected with
  e-payment klez via your fast always-on DSL connection, come back the
  next day and find that it's sent 50,000 messages so it's spent
  $1,000 of your money.  If you waive fees for virus victims, every
  spammer's going to claim a virus did it.  And maybe a virus really
  did do it, it's the obvious way to send spam with someone else's
  stamps.

* It turns every ISP into a bank.  ISPs don't have the expertise to be
  banks, nor can they afford the financial exposure.  What are you
  going to do when 10 of your users get e-klez, refuse to pay the
  postage that the virus stole, and leave you holding a $10K bag?

* Nobody in the world has the faintest idea how you could implement 2
  cent payments fast and cheap enough to use to pay for e-mail.

If you're serious about e-postage, could you let us know what your
solutions to these problems are?  You may have insights that the rest
of us don't, but we'll never know if you don't tell us.

Regards,
John Levine, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
(and postmaster of about 100 other domains)

PS: Anti-spam laws aren't going to solve everything, but the TCPA made
a whole lot more difference to the junk fax problem than any set of
phone line filters.