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

Posted Nov 10, 2025 19:02 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

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.