Re: [Asrg] The fundamental misconception about paying for mail

[der Mouse <mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG>]

> No, we give them a free ride because the incremental cost of each
> message we receive is so close to zero as to be effectively zero.

Who's this "we"?  The cost of a received email to me is substantially
greater than zero.  Even the ones that are delete-on-sight cost me at
least a few seconds of my time.

> However, SMS messages cost me actual money to receive, so in spite of
> all the useful services available via SMS, there are exactly zero
> companies I have authorized to send me messages via that mechanism.

That's an interesting analogy.  SMSes cost me no money at all to
receive, but I go to moderately extreme lengths to avoid stray SMSes
because the human-layer costs involved are much higher.  (Typically,
they wake me up.)

>> [...] that would still kill vast amounts of mail that people want,
>> such as this very mailing list.
> Only if you assume a system where everybody is required to pay all
> the time, which is a ridiculous strawman. There's no technical reason
> why I should not be able to simply whitelist traffic from this list
> to be delivered for free.

Except that that leaves you wide open to spam forged to appear to be
from the list - or even sent through the list.

> Even if the hypothetical system was so dumb that it required everyone
> to pay to send e-mail all the time, a lot of things that used to be
> handled as e-mail are handled as web feeds now, and this list could
> easily be one of them.

This sounds like "what's more, it doesn't matter if it _does_ kill off
email, because there are other things taking over from email anyway".

I disgaree.  You can go use your web feeds if you like.  I'll stick
with email, thankyouverymuch.  I actually hope "most people" join you
in jumping to the web; if the population of email users drops back to
pre-September-that-never-ended levels, spam might move off email.

> And of course, a lot of the commercial traffic is moving towards the
> social networking sites too. Where, strangely enough, it seems not to
> be impossible to charge commercial senders small fees per message.

Well, sure.  They have a "post office", in that all communication goes
through a central clearinghouse organization.  It works fine, at small
scales and with many such clearinghouses.

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