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From fork-admin@xent.com  Mon Aug 12 11:08:40 2002

My ideal mailwall will allow message passthrough in many ways:
- Sender membership on my personal whitelist or any one of
many other external whitelists I respect
- Payment of a small fee (via a website and PayPal link)
- Demonstration of special per-message effort, either
via...
- a computational challenge (hashcash)
or
- other challenge that requires human-level flexibility &
followthrough (sender manual whitelisting)
- Inclusion of a legally-enforceable guarantee that the
mail is not an unsolicited commercial pitch -- one
example of this class of guarantee would be a posted
bond
- By convincing some analysis software agent of mine that
I want to see the mail, based on its content and
distribution list
There's no need to do only one. Some might overlap; the manual
process for passing a message through might require the assertion
of a legally-enforceable guarantee about the messages' contents.
Passing certain tests once might add an address to the persistent
whitelist.
Any slightly determined and legitimate correspondent would be
able to find multiple ways to get their mail read, while spammers
would face a situation where the marginal cost of reaching me
is much, much greater than the expected return.
Some economically irrational spammers (and religious/political
zealots) would get through, but such traffic should be a
background trickle rather than an annoying torrent.
- Gordon
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork