In message <9911191815.AA00507@liv-26.outlawnet.com>,
garyb@fxt.com wrote:
>Actually, a vetting database would be fairly easy...
I dunno about ``fairly easy'', but it is certainly within the realm
of technical possibility.
As I already noted, the hard is knowing who to trust.
>There would be a once-per-year cost for the certificate (like
>secure servers) which might be a problem for small lists...
Asking people to pay money in order to run a mailing list *would* be
a problem, in general.
A lot of lists are run for strictly altrustic reasons... the people
who run them do so as a kind of public service, and they receive
absolutely no clear benefits (other than satisfaction and enhanced
status in the community) for doing so.
It doesn't take a lot of foresight to predict that these people will
almost universally balk if asked to pay money merely for the privledge
of _continuing_ to persue their respective avocations.
>Hey, I'd think this would be a good opportunity for someone to do -
>Thawte might even want to provide this service.
*I* would gladly provide the service, *if* I believed that this was
a viable plan that would lead to a decrease in improper blocking of
legitimate opt-in mailing list traffic and/or an increase in people's
ability to block spam.
I think that there would be no shortage of volunteers (to operate such
a service), *if* the plan was viable. But any plan based upon extracting
any kind of fee from the operators of legitimate opt-in mailing lists
will almost certainly meet with great resistance in practice.
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