Recipients get the postage

[Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>]

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I was reading old threads on remailers, where various ideas were
suggested to reduce abuse.  One was to charge postage, in order to
discourage spam and somewhat discourage nastygrams, as well as to
compensate the remailer operator for his risks.  A variant was to tell
the recipient that he had anonymous mail waiting, and possibly charge him
to receive it.

I had a different idea, which has probably been suggested before: make
the sender of the anonymous mail pay, but pass the money to the
recipient.

All my complaints come from people who have received mail, never from
people who have sent it.  So obviously the steps we take need to make
recipients happier.  Paying them is one way to do it.

Of course there are lots of details: how much should be charged, will
recipients really be so thrilled when a "fuck you" note has a nickel
wrapped in it, how will they cash their checks, etc.  If ecash
were used this might be a motivation for people to open an account.

Nym servers could be funded by the nym owners to pay for a certain number
of messages.  Since the nym owner ends up receiving the cash it doesn't
actually cost him anything and he can easily afford to keep a pool of
cash in the nym server to keep the messages coming through.

Remailers which wanted to apply this rule would have to deposit the money
and immediately withdraw the same amount to include in the outgoing mail.
Users would basically have to trust the remailers to do this honestly.
Maybe it only needs to be done when the mail goes to a non-remail end
user destination, not for the intermediate links in the chain.

Postings to newgroups and mailing lists would make the cash available to
the first one who grabs it.  It can be a fun game; we've done it here
occasionally.  This might also motivate people to sign up for ecash.

Just a thought -

Hal

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