[Asrg] POSTAGE The fundamental misconception about paying for mail

[Steve Atkins]

On Nov 29, 2008, at 4:31 PM, John Levine 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.
>
> Now wait a minute.  A day ago someone purporting to be you said that
> even at a nickel a message the cost would be trivial:
>
>> If it cost me a penny to send each e-mail, I don't see that it would
>> make any difference to how much e-mail I sent. You could probably
>> even increase the price to 5c per message and I wouldn't blink.
>
> Now we find that outgoing mail is so expensive that you want special
> rules to avoid paying for some of it.  Better make up your mind -- is
> your mail stream too cheap to care about or not?  For that matter, if
> people are willing to waive the fee for mail from the IRTF, why
> wouldn't they waive the fee on every list they sign up for, commercial
> or otherwise?  After all, they get all that mail without being paid
> now.
>
> Finally, if we'd still need special handling to whitelist the mail we
> think is nice, what problem would a vast e-postage system be solving?

Wanted mail from strangers. This is *the* hard thing to handle, and  
while
I don't think a vast e-postage scheme will be of much help, I've not  
seen
much else that looks any better.

Cheers,
   Steve