Hashcash (was: TMDA)

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

(To sum up my feelings on the issue -- I recognize that other people
feel that they have no other option but to use a challenge-response
service to deal with mail from people they don't know, and that's OK
by me.  I do feel, however, that if I were to do so, I would be
slightly rude, since I haven't gotten to the point of desperation
where spam is concerned.  But people are different.)

Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com> writes:

> Agreed ... and for that reason, I putting my two cents in to support
> Hashcash.

Which brings me to what I wanted to write about.  I think hashcash is
a brilliant idea, as it requires no centralized functionality, and
people can just switch over to using hashcash when they want, and
other people can choose to recognize hashcash when they want, or
not.  For instance, I could easily see me putting in a mail split
rule that says "if this is a hashcashed message, put it in nnml:misc,
and don't do any further tests for spamminess.

So I want to make Gnus support X-Hashcash.  I see that there's a
hashcash.el in the contrib directory, written by Paul E. Foley.
Would it be possible to assign the copyright for this to the FSF?

There doesn't seem to be any code in there to verify the hashcash
payment.  Does anybody have anything for doing that?

Also, the posting code seems to be synchronous.  I think it would be
nice to put the hashcash generation in the background, and postpone
the sending until the message has been hashcashed.  Has anybody done
any work in that area?  Could, perhaps, the delayed nndrafts code be
used for that?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen