>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. If I had a tenth of a cent for every time someone assumed the existence of a global low-cost highly reliable micropayment clearing system, it wouldn't matter, because there is no such a system and never will be, so I couldn't collect it anyway. The problems that make e-postage impossible are entirely unlike the ones that might have faced WWW and IM. It's basically a banking problem, not a software or networking problem. I wrote a white paper a couple of years ago that laid out the situation, which only needs some minor updates to make the numbers even less favorable than they were then. Visit http://www.taugh.com, where it's white paper #1 near the bottom of the page. Regards, John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf