Re: [Asrg] Two ways to look at spam

On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 05:33:52PM +0100, Bruce Stephens wrote

> If a person unknown to me can send me an email that I want to receive
> (and I want them to be able to), then that person can send me unwanted
> email (and I don't want them to be able to do that, but I see no way
> to stop it without also preventing the possibility of wanted email).

  You've hit the nail on the head there.  This has given me an
inspiration that'll appear as a long message in a day or so.

> So I think the best way to attack spam is to make sending email
> expensive (in some way---this may involve computational cost rather
> than some kind of financial framework) such that anybody sending me
> email thinks a bit first (and so it won't be worthwhile sending to
> large numbers of people).  So this would be attacking the volume part
> of usual definitions of spam.

  A few problems...

  1) I don't throw away a pefectly good computer and buy the
latest/greatest every year.  This email is coming from a 433 mhz machine
with 128 megs of RAM.  How do I compare with someone who's just bought a
512 meg machine that runs at 3 gigahertz ?

  2) A beowolf cluster of cast-off 1 gigahertz machines will blow the
"computational cost" to smithereens.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
Email users are divided into two classes;
1) Those who have effective spam-blocking
2) Those who wish they did

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