RE: Remailer Abuse Solutions

[ph@netcom.com (Peter Hendrickson)]

At 11:10 AM 11/14/1996, Mullen Patrick wrote:
> First of all, I would like to apologize if it looked like I accused Peter of
> being involved with a conspiracy.  I have communicated with him privately
> concerning this matter, and am now making my public apology.  Thanks!

"Business you can do with anyone.  Yachting you can only do with
gentlemen." (roughly) -- J.P. Morgan

A public apology was hardly necessary, but it is certainly accepted! ;-)

> Concerning my other statements, I think I was a little confused on the
> implementation of this idea, but now that I've re-read the posts, I'm confused
> in another way.  It seems this feature only applies to mail forwarded through
> a remailer.

While at first this may seem awkward, it's actually a feature because
the remailer operator handles the e-cash and cuts a check once in awhile.

This has the effect of converting a "victim" who hates remailers into
a person who loves spam and loves remailers.  This makes it harder to
outlaw anonymity or impose Dyson-style "limited" anonymity.  Plus, it's
just a good business practice.

> As mentioned on several posts, which may be the main idea, this
> would reduce the amount of noise submitted to lists.  This would be a good
> thing, for sure.  Knowing that your useless messages are costing even $.25
> would be enough to cut down drastically on spam.

And, for people who get their kicks out of spamming people they don't like
it must be galling to have to pay their "victim" money for the privilege!

> However, I still don't see how this is to be implemented for direct email.

Once again, I seem to have combined several ideas in a confusing way.
Initially, I was talking about how a remailer operator would solve his
problem of people abusing the remailer and creating enemies for him
and for remailers in general.  I think it is clear that this solves
the problem.

Once such a feature is in existence, how else could it be used?

That's what the rest of my message was really about.

> How would this work for an entity sending email directly to your account,
> rather than through a remailer?

This assumes that spam has gotten so bad that everybody filters their
mail and only accepts mail on the "accept" list.  People sending mail
directly to your account would get a message back saying that they had
to get on the "free" list or send their mail through one of the approved
remailers.

> The solutions that come to mind are 1) get new mail software which performs
> this filtering/charging...

It is much easier to let the remailer operator hassle with the cash.
Mail software which handles e-cash well is going to take awhile and it
introduces a lot of very real security issues.

Filtering is already widely available in mail programs.  And, it can
be front ended to anything with procmail.

> and 2) have an autoreply that sends mail not sent
> through your "post office" back to the sender with a note saying to route
> it through the "post office."  This "post office" would be much like with
> snail mail.  All it does is collect and redistribute mail (for a small fee,
> of course... :-)  This would be a good business proposition, indeed.  However,
> I don't know how widely accepted it would be.

I don't think you'd necessarily want to route all of your mail through
the post office, just mail which isn't on your "free" list.

Peter Hendrickson
ph@netcom.com