On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote: > I agree that this demonstrates that the 'charge per email' schemes that > people have don't work. It doesn't demonstrate any such thing. The physical junk mail I receive is much more targeted to my family than spam is. I wouldn't bother with spam filtering if I only got 5-10 junk emails per day. At 350-450 spams per day, I can't afford not to wory about filters. In addition to postage, physical mail has significant production costs. Some junk mail probably costs more than $1 per mail piece. Big incentive to send it carefully. There is a very low production cost for spam, even the legitimate retailers who send well designed electronic spam only have design costs and no significant per piece cost. It is pure naviety to assert that increasing the cost of sending spam will not reduce the amount sent. The operative word is REDUCE. Also note that my choice of words was 'cost'. There are many ways to associate cost with sending spam. It isn't a trivial technical problem to revise the electronic message infrastructure to arrange for payment of postage but to assert that it can't be done or wouldn't be deployed flys in the face of the relatively short time frame for adoption of the WWW or IM. Do you truly believe that if a reliable alternative to the current email infrastructure were available, which could operate in parallel with the current infrastructure in which you got minimal unsolicited email, it wouldn't be quickly adopted by major players? Dave Morris _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf