Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 10, 2025 17:48 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source) by paulj
Parent article: Debian to require Rust as of May 2026

So... it's just a strawman. There are no regulations nor taxes that would apply to some trivial-scale "friends and family" next-gen-email-replacement system.

Sez you. When the tax man rings my doorbell I'll refer them to you.

Anyway, as I said, the whole payment-for-mail issue is moot as far as I'm concerned because, as I've outlined in my previous message, there are better approaches for “next-gen-email-replacement systems” that don't even involve money (let alone shady cryptocurrencies).

Incidentally, one problem that makes me not like the pay-to-play approach to email is that I run a bunch of mailing lists (some with a few hundred subscribers). If I need to pay a trivial amount for each email message sent across these lists, that trivial amount times the number of subscribers times the number of messages per day at some point becomes not quite so trivial anymore. The obvious solution to this is to charge mailing list subscribers, but then hey, suddenly instead of someone with a fun hobby I'm a news publisher running a paid-for service for the public and again all sorts of regulations start to apply (apart from the hassle connected with having to ensure that every subscriber puts their contribution into the kitty). Why would I ever go for that sort of thing when right now I don't need to pay anything above the cost of the mail server, which is a trivial amount?

Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 10, 2025 18:00 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

> (apart from the hassle connected with having to ensure that every subscriber puts their contribution into the kitty)

If your understanding of what I've been sketching is a system where you have to manually charge people each time they send their message to your distribution group, then... let's just leave this. (It's way OT anyway).

Also, again, there's no tax obligations for a group of people running systems for informal associations. There are all kinds of clubs out there, where people pay money to cover the costs the activity of that club (e.g. hosting a website, hosting races for things like running and cycling clubs, buying club kit, etc.), and it's all on an unincorporated basis and there are no tax obligations on the club or the person who handles the money for the specific activity that generated the cost, if there are only costs involved. Both English and Irish law definitely have the concept of unincorporated associations, I know this for a fact, and I'm pretty sure there is an equivalent in germanic jurisdictions - that probably then covers very large swathes of the world, given how many others derive from those in some way.

Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 10, 2025 18:04 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

If you search for unincorporated association you will find the UK HMRC page that says what I wrote there, as you don't believe me.

Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 10, 2025 19:02 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

If your understanding of what I've been sketching is a system where you have to manually charge people each time they send their message to your distribution group, then... let's just leave this.

Now you're building the strawman. Obviously, the way this would really work is that people subscribe to the mailing list in the way they would subscribe to a magazine, i.e., X amount of money/month gets you everything that goes through the list. You would calibrate X such that your cost to send N messages per month to M subscribers would be less than X*M. Depending on the readership and volume of your mailing list, X*M can be a non-trivial amount of money. You would still have to have some sort of infrastructure to sort out every subscriber's payments (especially since, for d…n sure, you don't want every subscriber to have to deal with the likes of Monero), and depending on how big X*M is, you're absolutely running a commercial enterprise here.

Again, the whole idea of founding an email system on micropayments is something that will never fly, anyway. There are better ways to fix email which also require large numbers of participants to warm to the idea but don't involve money.