Re: SPAM-less email (was If anybody wants to make something in Adabut

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@d2-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@crs4.it> wrote:
: 
: In some countries it is illegal to send unsolicited commercial e-mail 
: (or to make unsolicited commercial phone calls).  So if you set up your 
: mail server to reject unsigned messages with a polite comment requesting 
: that people sign their letters with a valid identifiable signature (and 
: maybe also a reference to the rules about unsolicited commercial 
: e-mail), you would be able to catch the senders of unsolicited 
: commercials and thus most likely be able to scare them from sending 
: anything to you in the first place.

That sounds just like the old way of catching senders when
they didn't have a fake email address, with flaming to follow.
One or more central signature verifying authorities are
certainly problematic in that someone will have to guarantee
absence of abuse of the data base. We don't manage absence
of abuse of spam mail, so there...
If you want the possibility of anonymous email, not just for
aquiring customers, but also in the form of a cry for
help of a person who had better not identify himself or herself
to the surveilling governmental sniffers in, say, Costa Peligrosa,
then a signiture is as fatal as an address that can be tracked down.
Mail abuse is a social, organisational problem, and cannot be solved
ignoring its social characteristic.
In a world where money is part of decision making, money is one
powerful means to control things, absent better solutions like
knowledgeable polititians and knowledgeable judges. (Or a better
world in general :-)
So if email trafic has to be paid for, counting every mail,
spammers will think twice, because they must make a decision
like everyone else who advertizes the traditional way. The
decision criteria will be both about money and possible punishment.
Social pressure is needed.

The technical difficulty then is to find a way to make sure
every email is handled only if an electric stamp is present.


-- Georg