[hashcash] Re: PR Problem?

On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 04:48:44PM +0000, DeLesley Hutchins wrote:


> I was surprised to find that Thunderbird still has no HashCash
> support.  It's a popular mail-reader, open source, with a plugin

Open-source programming requires that someone with some programming
skill has an itch to scratch. Apparently, nobody capable of writing
Thunderbird plugins has felt that itch yet or it would already have been
done.

Integration is an issue. Hashcash is *not* trivial to implement at the
MUA level, isn't a drop-in piece of the MDA toolchain, and even MTA
support (where it exists) may not play well with other tools.

TMDA (http://tmda.net) has had hashcash support for a while in the
development branch, but only recently in the stable branch. And even
there, while you can get hashcash to work, it's not self-evident how to
really apply the process to inbound mail (e.g. do you use hashcash to
bypass C/R, or to modify your scoring, or something altogether
different?) and so it isn't turned on by everyone.

If you want wider uptake, you have to address the installed based of
software. And more importantly, you have to convince people that it adds
value to install and configure it even if almost no one else does the
same. OpenPGP cleartext-signing is a great example of this philosophy:
it provides some observable utility (non-repudiation) even if the vast
majority of one's email correspondents don't use PGP/GPG. 

FWIW, now that TMDA supports hashcash in the stable branch, *I* use it
to mint stamps on all outgoing email from my MUA. But I don't check
incoming email, because:

    1. I almost never get X-Hashcash headers from anyone I know, and

    2. I don't really see the informational value of checking for it
       with my existing toolchain, since I don't use scoring per-se.

At some point, if I'm feeling industrious, I might try to whomp up a
procmail filter that appends an X-Hashcash-Validated header to messages
that have valid stamps, so that bogofilter (or other tools) might score
them a bit higher. That would be useful to me. How do *you* use
X-Hashcash headers?

-- 
Unabashedly littering the information superhighway with detritus like
this for over 15 years now.

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