Subject: Re: [Asrg] The fundamental misconception about paying for mail

From: "David Nicol" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 14:46:24 -0600

On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 4:56 AM, Alessandro Vesely <[email-masked]> wrote:
> mathew wrote:
>>
>> [...] There's no technical reason why I should not be able to
>> simply whitelist traffic from this list to be delivered for free.
>
> Is that because a list subscriber (you, I presume) happens to be the
> postmaster at the receiving site? If not, do you mean all users have both
> the permissions _and_ the patience to whitelist lists that they subscribe
> to?
>
> I'm asking because I see no means for automated registration of opt-ins. Am
> I missing something?

The Advenge system as operating in 2003 sent the recipient a notice
when a message passed the whitelist due to a text search hit against
one of their "magic phrases."  This notice contained a URL to
whitelist the sender and a URL to whitelist the source IP for use with
mailing lists, the assumption being that good mailing list traffic
comes from a small set of IP addresses that only produce good mailing
list traffic.

Also, there are a set of business models at the other end of
sender-pays from nominal charges for bulk, which are high charges for
in-demand people.  For instance, a sender-pays e-mail system capable
of charging a reading fee at a publishing house overwhelmed by
over-the-transom submissions makes sense, as well as celebrity charity
projects.  So much money to e-mail your favorite celebrity, and the
funds go to buy baby formula for the poor people of Roxbury.
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---

From: Barry Shein <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 16:21:33 -0500

On November 29, 2008 at 17:37 [email-masked] (mathew) wrote:
 > On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 13:49, John Levine <[email-masked]> wrote:
 > 
 > > There are 650 recipients on this mailing list.  Are you willing to pay
 > > $32.50 for each message you send to it?  If not, do you think someone
 > > else should pay?  Who should it be?
 > 
 > 
 > I assume that people who wanted to receive mail from non-commercial mailing
 > lists like this one would need to agree to receive it without payment.

For the record I don't think it should ever be up to the end-recipient
to decide whether or not the sender pays.

The sender should pay for trying to deliver, just like postal mail.

As to "$32.50 for each message" I don't see any reason on earth or in
heaven as to why any of this would lead to such an untenable
situation. It's another straw man.

As I've said before I'd imagine something more like IETF as a
non-profit pays, say, $500/year which allows them to send 1M
non-commercial messages a month or whatever some investigation into
such needs deems reasonable (I don't know off-hand how many msgs IETF
sends currently.)

But to continue the example current mega-spammmers send around a
billion messages a day each, ~30B/month. If they had to pay the same
rate as above, $500/year per 1M msgs/month, that'd be, lessee, they
send 30B/mo, so that's 30,000 x IETF, 30,000 x $500/year, $15 million
per year.

That's not to say there might not be a discount at such lofty levels
but let's get real here. What spammer could even pay $1M/year let
alone $15M/year. Yet that might only incur $500/year for IETF, a mere
bagatelle, let's pass the hat.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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From: Barry Shein <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 17:17:16 -0500

On November 29, 2008 at 23:35 [email-masked] (SM) wrote:
 > At 19:21 29-11-2008, mathew wrote:
 > >So if Microsoft annoy a significant number of their customers by 
 > >making it easy for third parties to spend all their e-mail postage 
 > >credits, people might start to favor Microsoft's competitors?
 > 
 > I don't think so as it's the ISP which is charging the subscriber and 
 > that's the competition I'm talking about.

Or the ISP passing through charges.

Assume a structure kind of like SSL certs. The ISP with 100K customers
(end-user types) buys a postage cert, say for 1K/day/customer so 100M
msgs/day aggregate.

Suddenly some user(s) is using 1M/msgs/day pushing the ISP over the
edge.

Well, the ISP can buy a bigger "cert" which presumably costs more,
perhaps passing that cost to that large consumer, or they can curtail
that sort of usage saying they don't sell that kind of thing go find
an ESP. Or maybe the customer is zombied, but same thing really.

 > >Wait, weren't you supposed to be arguing that this was a bad thing?
 > 
 > No.
 > 
 > Rich explained who is responsible for the hazard.  I mentioned why it 
 > may be difficult to fine the subscriber for the negligence when the 
 > he/she has been sold the idea of "unlimited" service.

Well, don't sell them unlimited service if things change. You're
tossing everything under that word "service".

No ISP sells unlimited everything for a small flat fee.

For example, mail inboxes are always finite as one very germaine
example. Exceed that limit and your incoming mail starts bouncing,
probably w/o much warning or recovery possible unless the sender can
be identified and will re-send.

At least cutting off outgoing mail would more immediate and obvious,
FWIW.

And there would be marketing wisdom in offering higher outgoing quotas
perhaps for a fee.

 > If e-mail postage is introduced and is a success, subscribers may 
 > elect to do away with using the ISP for mail services and SMTP 
 > access.  That can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on where you stand.

Many people don't have much choice, port 25s are blocked, anything
looking like a pool IP address is blocked from many sites, etc.

I guess they can go buy a DS3 and apply for a /22...

-- 
        -Barry Shein

---

From: Alessandro Vesely <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:41:40 +0100

(apologies for the delay)
> comes from a small set of IP addresses that only produce good mailing

Did it have more authentication/verification option than GPTP?
(I only found 
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/asrg/current/msg12583.html and 
urls mentioned therein about it.)