Yes, I keep thinking about the impact of providing digital signatures to
everyone, and any de jure or de facto requirement that e-mail be signed.
The latter is what you are suggesting, which I think would rapidly occur:
people would configure their mailers to reject e-mail that wasn't digitally
signed.  The signatures of spammers could be accumulated, and also
trace/prosecute the offenders.

If the US Postal Service had any foresight, they'd offer a CA (charging a
fee, but much less than the Vaseline-inducing folks at Verisign), and other
e-mail related services.  This is a much better era to offer an MCI Mail
type service, than were the mid-80's; this would allow them to recover some
of the money lost to e-mail.

	--- Noel

-----Original Message-----
From: squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org
[mailto:squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org]On Behalf Of Stephen
Pair
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 20:38
To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: RE: GPG plugin (was Re: [ANN][VM][SF] my Unix patches
integrated into SF layout)

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