Comment by jonathanyc

> The idea of “weighing souls” reminded me of another anti-spam solution from the 90s… believe it or not, there was once a company that used poetry to block spam!

> Habeas would license short haikus to companies to embed in email headers. They would then aggressively sue anyone who reproduced their poetry without a license. The idea was you can safely deliver any email with their header, because it was too legally risky to use it in spam.

Kind of a tangent but learning about this was so fun. I guess it's ultimately a hack for there not being another legally enforceable way to punish people for claiming "this email is not spam"?

IANAL so what I'm saying is almost certainly nonsense. But it seems weird that the MIT license has to explicitly say that the licensed software comes with no warranty that it works, but that emails don't have to come with a warranty that they are not spam! Maybe it's hard to define what makes an email spam, but surely it is also hard to define what it means for software to work. Although I suppose spam never e.g. breaks your centrifuge.