on 8/19/2002 7:49 PM Donald Eastlake 3rd wrote: > Alternatively, if a user can't or won't configure any whitelist and > their system just defaults to charging, say, 5 cents for each incoming > email, and this behaviour were common, what would the effect be? The effect would be squat. Since I like you, I'll escort you down three different logic trees for this. First of all, a 5c per-recipient fee is 29c cheaper than postal mail. If you were a marketer with a mailing to spew, which would you choose? In the end, if cost were our only weapon, the only fee that would make people NOT prefer spam would be a fee that was higher than the postal equivalent, since the automated handling of spam is still significantly cheaper than envelope stuffing and meter-feeding management. Frankly, a fee that high would simply force the abandonment of email. People would move to ICQ or whatever instead, and they would do it fast. The spammers would follow them there, and the root problem would not have been solved. Secondarily, even though a fee structure would likely cause many of the less savory spammers to stop spewing, it would also legitimize spam for mainstream outfits (it would have a public fee structure, acting as an admission gate for socially acceptable behavior). There are about 20 million official businesses in the US alone. If only .1% of them sent a single message every month -- "hi, don't forget us when it comes time to buy widgets" -- that's 20,000 such notices per month. Again, we would have simply accelerated the abandonment of mail. In the end, we have to treat this like any other kind of trespassing, and legislation is the only thing that will do it. Why don't these same idiots go around parking lots, putting bumper stickers on people cars? Why haven't we passed laws saying that ~"anybody can put a bumper sticker on anybody's car for 5c"? It's the same issue. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/