[Spambayes] Two Stage Plan

T. Alexander Popiel popiel at wolfskeep.com
Wed Dec 18 14:33:23 EST 2002


In message:  <BA26581A.1B368%grobinson@transpose.com>
             Gary Robinson <grobinson@transpose.com> writes:
>OK, but MOST of those expenses go away in the
>MS-monopoly-it-goes-along-with-your-software-rental fees, as far as I can
>tell, right?
>
>1. Account setup has already happened.
>
>2. There is very little storage per $.01 transaction of an already
>registered user. It coule probably be done in, oh, 20 bytes, including
>timestamp. yes there is some overhead to carry out the updates, but as an
>experienced database guy, I don't think it's going to be too significant for
>this application.

You can only shrink it that small if you give up tracability.
Otherwise you need things like the datetime, sender/receiver,
and unique identifiers... minimum of about a hundred bytes
once indexes are added, etc.  More if you use non-binary
formats or wrap stuff in XML or something stupid (but popular!).

>4. Billing costs. The only billing cost is in loading the account, say, once
>per year, and it would probably be part of an overall software subscription
>bill that MS would be sending out anyway, if MS is the vendor.  It would be
>negligible comparitively. remember that $1 would actually pay for MANY
>transactions because the $.01 is being shifted between user accounts all the
>time and is reused by the recipient.

If you only bill once a year, then you start running into
problems tracking down mid-level fraud (because the customers
won't alert you to problems until they see the bill, and by
then the trail has most likely gone cold).

Small-scale fraud is just a cost of business, and large-scale
fraud you'll notice yourself.

>5. Authentication. Again only done in the loading of the account, and
>depending on whether it's part of a larger software rental package, may be
>being done anyway.

If you only do authentication at account load time, then you
run into problems with spammers masquerading as other users.
Return-address forgery is already a problem... it'll get
worse as real money gets attached to it.

>6. Retrieval costs -- outside audits. I think this probably goes away too
>for the reasons above but you'd have to spell it out more for me to be sure.

No, outside audits don't go away.  Anyone who handles large
amounts of money (and this would be a large amount of money,
even at only a penny per email) gets their accounting practices
scrutinized.  I'll grant that MS is already under such scrutiny,
but being a broker as well as a vendor adds a whole other dimension
to the mess.

- Alex



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