From: Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org>
Date: Tue, 26 Dec 1995 04:32:19 +0800
To: tallpaul@pipeline.com (tallpaul)
Subject: Re: Only accepting e-mail from known parties
In-Reply-To: <199512251933.OAA14735@pipe8.nyc.pipeline.com>
Message-ID: <199512251953.OAA01614@homeport.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


	The basic problem is that (personal) spam is a social, not a
technical problem.  If someone wants to annoy you via the internet,
they can do so.  You can raise the cost of their annoying you, but you
need to be careful not to make it difficult to talk to you.

	Stamps are an annoying solution unless the stamp buys the
sender something that the sender wants (perhaps such as
pseudononymity).

	It would seem that only accepting signed mail, and caching the
hash of the signed part would work pretty well, and also not require
anything (other than a signature) from the remote end.  The cost of a
spam is the time to generate a new key pair.  (You probably need some
way to add new keys, for people to be able to say 'I'd like to talk to
you.')

Adam


| If not, then /dev/null. If so, then: 
|  
|      a) send the message to me; 
|      b) delete the used e-stamp from the data base; 
|      c) send a confirmation of received message with a new e-stamp in it. 
|  
| Thoughts? (I see one problem with this but it should be able to be worked
| out once the basic method is agreed to). 

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume