[Asrg] POSTAGE, was The fundamental misconception about paying for mail

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 09:30:14AM -0500, Paul Russell wrote:
> Human nature guarantees that someone somewhere will attempt to thwart
> any technology that might make a significant dent in the spam problem.
> If universal simultaneous deployment and total infallibility are
> non-negotiable requirements for any proposal, then nothing will ever
> be done.

I concur, but I do think one non-negotiable requirement for any proposal
is that it must not be one that spammers have already defeated.
That rules out *anything* that depends on the presumed integrity of
end-user systems.

I think there are other design principles that can be applied as well,
e.g., "anything that generates still more SMTP traffic is probably headed
the wrong direction" and "anything that presumes spammers will passively
(or actively) cooperate won't work", and so on.

---Rsk