Spambuttbuttin Extinguished Bill 6789

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Ian Hilliard wrote on Wed, 07 Dec 2005 21:26:00 +0100

Not a bad idea in some respects, though it would have to be administered by the US Postal Service, which has suggested in the past a 5 cent fee for every email. (Presumably that would be 5 cents over the main wires; business interdepartmental mail would probably not be trackable, let alone chargeable, by outside agencies.)

Or perhaps it's 5 cents for every store-and-forward cycle. For anyone old enough to remember the '!' format, that would translate into 5 cents for the initial send and 5 cents for every bang. However, modern servers would make the actual forward transparent to the user, instead...and if that forward is detectable over the main wires, another 5 cents is chargeable to the sender.

Maybe.

Of course there's a problem with the protocols. Say someone had a box named 'www.myfavoritecompany.com'. (OK, so I picked that rather hirsuite blue-backgrounded website at random. Now I know it exists. :-) ) It turns out that this is an alias for www.myfavoriteco.com, and

The usual MX lookup will result in mail-fwd.mx.vhw1.net, it turns out -- and that's who SMTP will talk to when sending the message. The problem is that this is a buried box, deep within vhw1.net's subnetwork somewhere.

When does USPS get its 5 cents? Would someone have to register the box with the USPS and be billed in arrears Or what?

This is a perfect example, it turns out.

Who else? The USPS would be the logical recipient in the US. Outside the US, it gets ... interesting. Even within the US it will get interesting, if anyone seriously contemplates this proposal of mine.

They'd take some heat for that, although at some point SMTP needs to be scrapped. My thinking: replace it with a secure SMTP, which would simply be SMTP-over-SSL-TLS (RFC2246). There's nothing all that wrong with SMTP other than the eavesdropping, AFAICT.

(No doubt someone's doing this already. I'd frankly have to look.)

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.