Read an article (in an ACM transactions, I believe) about such a system
- each user would many virtual mailboxes. Unprivileged writers would
only know the basic public box, which would discard any message not
bearing a stamp (some form of micropayment). After you recognize a
friend has sent you a stamped message, the polite thing to do is of
course to return the stamp along with a priviledged sub-address that
doesn't require a stamp.

So once you've made contact, it's just email. But if you're a spammer,
you pay for every unwanted mail you want read.

Of course, micropayments are still quite a bit less available than
encryption, so...

But it's a nice idea.

Daniel

Stephen Pair <spair at advantive.com> wrote:
> Along these lines, it would be great to create an entirely Squeak based
> email system that would allow the email account holder to decide who is
> allowed to send them messages...I imagine that some sort of protocol
> involving public key cryptography could be useful such a system...spam
> is such a huge annoyance these days that such a system might get a lot
> of attention.
> 
> - Stephen
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> > [mailto:squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On 
> > Behalf Of Tim Rowledge
> > Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 5:55 PM
> > To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> > Subject: GPG plugin (was Re: [ANN][VM][SF] my Unix patches 
> > integrated into SF layout)
> > 
> > 
> > "Lex Spoon" <lex at cc.gatech.edu> is widely believed to have written:
> > 
> > >  And I've thought GPGPlugin would
> > > be nice, to hook into Celeste.
> > I was just about to post a message asking about this. Some 
> > form of ability to handle encrypted mail would be pretty 
> > handy. There's quite a bit to it from some discussions I've 
> > had recently with a friend that wrote much of the original 
> > SSL stuff. Considering that we are discussing seriously 
> > subversive topics here that impact M$'s plans to take over 
> > everything we should be more careful to encrypt it.
> > 
> > tim
> > 
> > -- 
> > Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, 
> > http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim Strange > OpCodes: LTT: Lose Timing
> Track
> > 
> > 
> >