Re: Excerpt on SPAM from Edupage, 11 February 1997

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

At 03:25 PM 2/12/97 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:

>Having said this, the flaw remains that "junk mail" is "free" to the
>sender. This is a flaw in the ontology of e-mail, and needs to be fixed.
>Digital postage is one approach.

I decided long ago (okay, well, many months ago) that the "solution" is to 
invent a mechanism to allow spammers/advertisers to include a small amount 
of ecash as a gift with every spam.  I figure that if USnail junk-mailers 
are willing to pay $0.32 for postage and probably $0.50 for production, 
printing, and labelling costs, all for no guarantees of results, they should 
even more happy to pay, say, 10 cents to each recipient.  At that rate, an average 
person would probably receive enough "spam" to  pay for his Internet 
account, quite analogous to the way advertiser-supported TV is presented to 
the public for no explicit charge.




Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com