E-mail Tax As Way Of Preventing Spam 592
scubacuda writes "This FT article criticizes current attempts to regulate spam. Re: Lessig's bounty-on-spammer proposal: 'This is a terrible idea that will make millionaires of two classes of people: reprobates who illegally maraud through others' hard drives; and those who have built their expertise about spam by peddling it, 'He considers the recent FTC spam conference "barking up the wrong tree," and thinks that the simplest way to regulate spam is through a tax: 'This requires smashing some myths....But, very soon, the Internet should turn into a penny post, with a levy of 1 cent per letter. This would cost the average e-mailer about $10 a year. Small companies would pay bills in the hundreds of dollars; very large ones in the thousands. And spammers would be driven to honest employment. The tax could be made progressive by exempting, say, those who sent fewer than 5,000 letters a year. The proceeds could go to maintain and expand bandwidth.'"
Is taxation best? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not with false headers (Score:5, Insightful)
it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, people hate paying for what they used to get for free, but if the price is reasonable then there's no reason not to accept it.
Note that I said reasonable price. In many cases where charges are introduced, the people running the system usually manage to turn this into a money-making exercise before too long.
mailing lists (Score:3, Insightful)
a really bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so maybe people signing up to a list would have to pay for the messages they receive... but now we're basically talking micropayments!
Danny.
Mailing lists? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the biggest failing in this is that to tax email would require a massive change to the email infrastructure- just send all email through your government approved relay. Sure- they won't look at it... putting this on top of SMTP- I don't think it would work- what would be the incentive to use it (other than possibly spam free email)?
Chilling effect on public free forums. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, adding *tax* to our e-mail (most of our forums are based on mailing list traffic) would completely cut down on the ability for members to communicate freely. Tax on e-mail is a *BAD* idea.
There are plenty of effective ways to deal with the SPAM problem. Tax is not one of them. Tax is never a solution to any problem.
broken record (Score:3, Insightful)
Thousands of email lists such as those hosted on Sourceforge would be shut down by a plan like this one, as well as killing lists like the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which sends millions of messages a year.
Also gone would be the days of the open mailing list, where people can send a message to the list without being subscribed, as is common in the open source world.
In short, this proposal guarantees that the only people able to use legitimate email lists will be large companies with the budget to spam. I got an unsolicited email from Wachovia this morning, apparently since I had a First Union account, they turned on all the marketing "spam me" options in my profile when the two merged.
I don't see how this tax will deter these semi-legitimate corporate spammers.
Uhm...and what if you have an e-mail virus? (Score:3, Insightful)
So what if you're infected by an e-mail virus that spams everyone in your address book? Should you be held liable and therefore pay for sending e-mail you didn't mean or want to send? Should you be held liable for security flaws in software you have no control over?
Yes, you (usually) have control over *which* e-mail client you use -- but there is no totally secure e-mail client. (Or do we expect everyone to use mutt or pine?)
This sounds like a simple idea, but to me the implications are a lot worse than receiving spams.
My counter-suggestion (pulled fresh outta my butt) would be e-mail quotas. Each account would have a quota of, say, 100 e-mails (or perhaps 100 SMTP SEND reqs) a day -- any more than that and you pay.
Cheers,
Ethelred
No! (Score:5, Insightful)
And kill off every user group, listserv, church mailing list, etc, etc.
Why do *I* have to suffer to stop idiot spammers?
Go after THEM, not me. Somewhere in the spam is a contact number or address (he has to get his money somehow). Ignore the often false reply to: and use that instead.
A penny an email will only ensure that some poor grandma is going tot get hit with a huge bill, because her PC or acct got hijacked, and the spams went out under her name.
Relaying & trojan smtps (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally
Whitelists are the way to go for me.
Dumb Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, in order to properly implement a tax, we'd have to have already solved the spam problem, which would make the tax superfluous.
No Internet Tax (Score:3, Insightful)
To put forward idea that we pay taxes on e-mail is to display your ignorance of how e-mail works. If I set up an e-mail server at my own expense, and send an e-mail through it to another server, set up at the recipients own expense, I fail to see where the government's services come into it. After running a few traceroutes to my most common e-mail destinations, all the hops belonged to corporations, not the government.
And those are just the techno-political reasons why taxes don't make sense. What about internation e-mails. I live/work in Canada, but a lot of our business is international (States, UK, etc).
I also don't think that the spam-killers-for-hire is a good idea either (difficult to regulate, and a good chance of a lot of innocent bystanders getting hurt.)
I personally like signed e-mails, and much stiffer penalties for spammers. This may seem like a soft solution, but laws end up being the last recourse. As many on Slashdot jump at pointing out, technological barriers are easily overcome, especially by a large group of determined people.
Article is lacking Technological Saavy (Score:5, Insightful)
As a second issue, how does the government tax foreign entities for email? And who do you tax, when spam is notoriously made difficult to trace?
And beyond that, I can imagine the dozens, if not thousands, of hackers, just waiting to have this sort of incentive to develop a better SMTP, one that solves many of the problems and loopholes that SMTP currently causes.
Also the article suggests that the federal government should be creating an Federal sales tax on internet purchases. Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought I already paid state tax. Atleast I do with any company that is doing business properly. This doesn't seem different than the old style catalog sales, where you order something out of state to avoid tax. I know Apple charges state tax in NY.
Really for a publication called the financial times, this is not a very financially sensible or reality based article. it seems to be written by someone whose only experience in the internet is reading about it.
Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:3, Insightful)
Theoretically sound (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam is a natural result of an unregulated network. The reason the Internet is so interesting and creative is because it's unregulated. You have to take the rough with the smooth. Sure, get angry at the spammers, prosecute them even. But don't think about restricting freedoms just because it's convenient to do so: that's what DMCA is about, and the Patriot act, and all the dozens of other stupid "anti-terrorist" laws that countries around the world are implementing right now.
Give me freedom, or give me death. I'll take the spam.
Re:Bad idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Bye-bye free email services
Bye-bye anonymous email-services
This won't work. (Score:1, Insightful)
Why then would a $.01 email tax work ? Even at that cost it would still be the cheapest and most effecient way to advertise.
Maybe we should start taxing
Impossible to effectively implement (Score:3, Insightful)
Open mail relays and forged message headers.
If you can't track the source, you can't bill them. So then who do you bill? The company with the open relay? Some would say that's a good way to promote good system administration, but remember that the bill imposed could easily put a company out of business and into bankruptcy. Sounds a little strong to me.
I still feel that we are better off not having a mandatory tax. Instead, set up third party message verification systems. Emailers can, for a fee, have their message ran through an intense one way hashing/encryption system to create a special "Registed Email" message header, which is then sent along with the original message to the intended recipient(s). Using this system is entirely optional, but read on for the benefits of using it at least once per recipient.
Upon reciept, the recieving email client will see the special header, check it's validity with the issuer, and place it in the user's inbox. If the message does not have the 'registed email' header, then the sender's name is checked against a list of known users. If the user is known (from having been manually entered or already recieved 1 registed email in the past, and not in the blocked senders list, the mail will again go into the users's inbox. All other mail is automatically placed in a folder of the user's choice. If that means the trash, fine.
There you go. Don't need to even care about open mail relays, because if you've never heard of them before, and they don't send registered email, you'll never see their penis enlarging message. I've thrown this idea out before, but I thought I'd see if I could get more feedback on it.
Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:3, Insightful)
interesting. (Score:3, Insightful)
--> Extream, yes. Untrue, well do you really want to find out? Lets tax something you pay to use already. Lets tax something to solve a problem that should be addressed with the right kind of legislation. Lets tax, then pay the very people that are spamming us to find the other people that spam us. Better yet, lets give them special powers.... I really love the idea that a "tax" will fix the problem. It would be a tax on just the US to pay to controll something that is world wide and rest of the world and 99% of the US does not even want controlled.
"I have an idea, lets tax e-mail!!! - Bring it up now, then 3 years down the road make it happen. They will scream, piss, and moan now but when we bring it up again in 3 years it will not seem so extream because they heard it once already. Yea, don't forget to say it will kill spam, child porn, and Ben Ladin...."
Taxes have one prupose (Score:2, Insightful)
Has anyone ever been put off drining, smoking or driving because of taxes? How about earning money? Owning a large house? Selling goods and services? All of these things are taxed. They have very little effect in reducing demand.
Re:Not with false headers (Score:5, Insightful)
We already have this. It's called a PGP signature.
The cost is a couple CPU cycles. Per email. Non-reusable, quick, easy and efficient. If everybody would start using PGP (which IMHO is a hell of a lot more likely than everybody switching to an "email-tax compatible" state-mandated commercial email client), we wouldn't have a spam problem any more.
Spammers just can't afford to sign their mails - with any signature. It's too expensive in CPU cycles. And note that the point here is NOT to validate the sender, it's just to validate that the sender had to burn a couple CPU cycles (which takes maybe a second on a 500MHz computer, for each email) to send it.
Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at the direct mailers filling the land fills with credit card offers and other equally unneed things.
Their business model INCLUDES the mailing cost cost (less than what you can pay) and the print costs. The USPS helps them to get in business.
Last I heard 80% of all mailings was junk mail.
Now a tax to send email... The ISP gets a cut, so they can increase network bandwidth. We pay as users to increase network bandwidth. They SPAMERS would pay too, it is included in their costs.
So what do you get... The same model as the USPS.
Now that shows why a price per email is not going to stop anything.
Wait - how the hell do they know who I am? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is taxation best? (Score:5, Insightful)
another poorly thought out proposal (Score:3, Insightful)
in Vanuatu [vanuatu.net.vu]
The only thing that we can do that isn't a band aid or a un-enforcable law is look at how to rewrite the SMTP [ietf.org] protocol, right now it is far too easy (by design) to send email from anywhere to anywhere without any accountability. We need a system that allows for servers to positively identified (something similar to a secure cert, not that I want to hand more money to Verisign but...) Then its up to the individual admin to decide what to do with email from a un-certified server; accept it, rate limit it, tag it, or deny it. Now no one _wants_ to rewrite all of the MTA's in the world, but at least this gives a way for non-compliant servers to get mail processed until everyone has gotten their's updated.
Er, obvious flaws (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the worst idea yet... (Score:2, Insightful)
Here is the solution to spam. Require every email sever to have a digital signature. Then sent up your email server to receive email from server with a valid and current signature. Also then set up the email servers to only send messages from authenticated local users. This will stop spamers from faking addresses. Then we need to crack down on free email accounts. Come on what incentive is there for Hotmail and Yahoo to crack down on users if no one is paying? Either make them pay for the service or put limits on the numbers of out going emails per hour, per day and per month. Disable mailing distribution lists on these sites.
A final thought about taxation. Say by some disastrous turn of events there is a tax on emails... Where is the tax money going to go? Certainly not to maintaining the Internet. It will go to highways and military defense if we are lucky. Most likely it will go to tax cuts for the rich.
We need to come up with a solution that is technological in nature, keep the government away from my emails.
Friendly
Unintended consequence regarding computer security (Score:3, Insightful)
Enough about SPAM (Score:3, Insightful)
-josh
Destroy the global village to save it, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like the spammers are winning their guerrilla war, then. We're suggesting responding with disproportionate force in a way that puts the main burden on noncombatants -- always the sign you're about to lose something like this.
I mean, we'd be throwing a huge burden on a system that basically works in order to go after abusers who've already shown they're not going to give up in an arms race for their survival. Good thinking. It's not like spammers would try to, say, abuse other people's servers to send messages without an attributable (read: taxable) source on them. No way. They wouldn't think of that one, no precedent for that... Or were we creating a big new policing division of the U.S. Postal service to defend e-mail servers?
Seriously, how wrongheaded is this? Extremely. It'd be impossible to administer and track without seriously degrading the flexibility and increasing the cost of e-mail systems we have right now on the cheap. How many times has your address changed? Who's tracking your tax bill across all those? Etc. etc. etc. Classic blindered thinking -- a pet idea we should pat on the head and move past. (Exactly how does this tax get collected across borders? Person hasn't addressed the international nature of the internet. Person suggests a "progressive" version, flying in the face of 20-some years of U.S. taxation trends. And so on.)
Create a new medium, don't try to fix the old on (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that trying to get an old medium to conform to today's demands might be more expensive (taxes or no taxes) than to simply coming up with a new one. A well-designed (and I don't claim to have one) solution would take less time to implement and I think would be easier to manage.
I understand that SSL, encryption and such would not be music to Dept. of Homeland Security's ears, that they would much rather leave the burden and cost on us, but there would be some upsides from their vantage point, too -- there would be less traffic for them to sift through (though it would be more intensive to process it), and I'm sure they'd get their back-door tentacles into the architecture somehow.
I won't even get into arguments like "how do you tax someone who's out of your jurisdiction", or "how do you get thousands of sysadmins try to add SSL to sendmail/qmail/pick-your-MTA without breaking backward-compatibility" etc. Just like gopher and ftp have/are becoming things of the past, I think SMTP should too.
"Tax" sender certs (Score:2, Insightful)
Then, only accept e-mail that's been signed properly. Anyone abusing a personal certificate gets blacklisted. If you don't want commercial e-mail, chuck anything signed by a commercial cert.
Manifestly untrue. (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam is one email being sent out a million times. Identical copies of messages flood a network. (If you don't believe this, I'll show you a spam I recently received which had over a thousand entries in the CC field. The spammer accidentally CCd instead of BCCd.)
If you're sending a million copies of one message, you only need one PGP signature. It becomes a fixed one-time fee per different email you send out, not a per-message CPU tax.
Re:The beast gets a facelift (Score:2, Insightful)
Such an idea obviously isn't really about getting rid of spam. If you could implement the things that would be required for a tax--like some way of knowing the sender of every E-mail that is sent--then the actual taxation wouldn't even be necessary.
Viruses more harsh (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, that this tax thing may trigger to make more viruses to flood out mails from innocent computers.
I was once for the idea, but after a thought, no.
Spammer's already paying tax (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:4, Insightful)
That's okay, the democrats say only the rich pay income taxes or benefit from tax cuts, so you're OBVIOUSLY rich... =)
I assume you've written your representative and asked them to support HR25, the Fair Tax Bill of 2003?
And that you vote Libertarian?
Re:I'd go for it (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead tax unsolicited commercial e-mail. Write a clear definition in the law of exactly what UCE is. Be sure to include any commercial e-mail sent to addresses on a list that was purchased, rented or leased.
Why bother everyone else with the administrative overhead of keeping track of how many e-mails they send? Just bother the spammers.
Require all spam to include a special message header with their spam-license in it. E-mail software or end users could check a government web site to make sure the license key is valid and that the spammer had paid their tax.
(nevermind the fact that such a special message header becomes a possible filtering criteria.)
Tax? No thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition, spammers would try to workaround those taxes, and possibly succeed, just like they forge the headers of spam they send today. As a result, legimate users would pay the tax and spammers would send the spam for free. Adding some heavy-weight bureaucracy to the problem (tax system) isn't the solution.
The idea in A Bounty on Spammers [cioinsight.com] article seems like a one possible way to go. It's not perfect because it doesn't get rid of the wasted bandwidth immediatly as it doesn't outlaw spam, only spam that isn't clearly marked as spam. I'm not entirely sure about the $10000 bounty the article suggests. I think it should be proportional to the number of spams sent -- say, $5 per spam sent. And make that $50 per spam sent if the spammer tried to forge headers! It would really hurt to send one million spams with forged headers unlike today.
Once we have [ADV:] in every spam we get, we can modify SMTP servers to return "555 Advertisements not allowed" if one tries to send a spam and save some wasted bandwidth.
Alternatively, once we get micropayments work, we can allow spammers to send spam that transfers some money to the reader once he reads the spam. Because sending spam doesn't cost anything, the spammer could choose to pay some small amount of money to get the receiver to read the spam.
Perhaps some poor guy could make a living reading spam?Unenforcable. (Score:3, Insightful)
I run my own server. Are they going to snoop my traffic to see how much email I send?
If so, I'll set up VPNs to the servers of people who I email regularly. Are they then going to demand to check my logs to ensure I'm paying the correct amount?
It's clear that economics morons who write crap like this have never read an SMTP RFC in their lifetime.
Oh my (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides the fact this is absolutely not technically possible (how do you want to do the accounting?), it would require cooperation from all internet-connected countries in the world. Somehow, I doubt that will happen.
Re:Article is lacking Technological Saavy (Score:3, Insightful)
More likely, they'd start sending really big Instant Messages.
And then, AIM's programmers would puff up it's features with things like "Buffer until recipient is online", to emulate the feel of old-fashioned email as much as possible, without actually meeting the legal definition and becoming taxable.
Ridiculous (Score:2, Insightful)
Truth is, most spam comes from posting up your email address on the 'net and having some sort of spider pick it up. Best way to stop this? Set up a simple website where you register your mail address, it gets MD5ed, and you can then be contacted through a webform using that MD5 key in the URL (the form will then transmit the email to you). This not only prevents spam, it allows people to mail you when they dont have a mail client available to them. Everyone wins, except the spammers. People who want to be anonymous could of course exploit this system (unless HTTP headers were included with the resultant mail).
Wrong and overly simplistic solution to spam. (Score:3, Insightful)
What in the world does the government have to do with bits being sent from one computer to another, and why should the government automatically get money for it without my consent? What if the machines were all within an intranet wholly owned by me? Of course the risk of spam would be much less, but try to see the point because some will unfairly (and very unreasonably) be taxed. A blanket process like that would, in the long run, only be of benefit to one person - Uncle Sam. Not the consumer.
I also highly doubt that these taxes can possibly be collected while also maintaining the anonymity of sender and receiver.
And rather than pay Uncle Sam indefinitely each time I send an e-mail, I would much rather invest that money in anti-spam software. That seems to make much more sense to me.
Re:Is taxation best? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh and btw, many of these laws were beneficial to the voters. Really good ideas that simply never took off due to lack of government interest. California for example passed a law many years ago that is still in courts. Basically denying medical or other government services to illegal aliens. It was never implemented as I understand. It was a good idea with over 80% voting yes. So much for our best interest.
BTW, as far as email spam goes, why not just make that illegal rather than taxing spammers. After all... it should be illegal. I think it safe to say that most spammers send out more than 5,000 email's a year. Perhaps setting that as a top limit of what defines a person as a spammer. Just a thought
Re:I'd go for it (Score:2, Insightful)
I am skeptical of any solution that requires a change in protocols--if the new protocol is open and free I'd be happy, but I'm afraid a new protocol could be just another effort for a few companies to take control of the Internet and decide who can and can't send email.
I'm also opposed to anything that charges for email. There are many users that send many, many emails per year. My website has an opt-in mailing list that sends emails to about 4000 people per evening. That's 1460000 per year. If we're charging 1-cent per email that's $14600.00 per year--and guess what, that's more than my website earns in a year. Bye bye mailing list.
Two things:
1. If there's going to be money involved, it has to be a system where the receiver can "return" money to authorized senders and only keep the money from unauthorized spammmers. And the money collected goes to the RECEIVER, not a tax that is kept by the government (which can be later raised, and raised, and you get the idea).
2. Solutions that require laws or massive changes in protocols must be very carefully watched. While it's not impossible there is a solution of that sort that could actually help, it's possible it could be a power-grab where certain companies would be allowed to decide who can and can't send email. Kind of like having a Constitutual convention in the U.S.: The last time it happened they threw out the whole thing and started over which is why sometimes people are afraid to have another Constitutal Convention. Same here, establishing a new protocol could either be extremely great and helpful or could serve the interests of a few and the rest of the world pays a price worse than the spam we're trying to get rid of.
I think the solution is technical. Widespread deployment of effective filters, especially Bayesian, at the ISP level will reduce the amount of spam that makes it to the users lowering even more than response rate. So we reduce how much spam we SEE via technical means and reduce how much spam is sent by taking spammers to court by charging them with theft of service or DoS attacks.
Taxation (Score:5, Insightful)
But congress tried again in 1913 [civilwarstudies.org], and was a 1% tax on the top 1% wage earners (in 1913, those that earned $3k to $20k per year).
Fast forward to today, and take a look at how far we've let the government tax our earnings... today, the top 1% wage earners pay 38.6% [fairmark.com] of their salary in taxes, accounting for ~ 29% of the total (top 5% wage earners paid 50% [allegromedia.com] of all taxes in 1999)
Now we have people saying, "I don't mind paying $0.01 for my emails"... What restraint has the government ever shown that next year it'll be $0.02, then $0.05 (who'll miss a nickle?), a dime... And where the hell will all this money go? into improving the internet infrastructure? Nooo, that's a private business. The money and accountability will disappear, probably into Medicare, Social Security, and all the other social programs that government isn't supposed to be in.
Government control is not a road we want to walk down folks. Yes, control of communications through taxation. I can't understand why the crowd complains when little things are being taken away, and the same people just turn around and hand the big ones over willingly.
Re:Is taxation best? (Score:4, Insightful)
" It wouldn't. But the government could finally cash in on the internet. Its all in our best interests of course."
Um, which government? As much as I will argue against the notion of the Internet as a lawless environment, the bottom line is that it is without borders, and spammers will easily be able to find an offshore haven from which to send their sexual enhancement ads. To assume that a US or UK law charging a per e-mail tax will somehow eliminate spam is unrealistic and unworkable. It will also significantly reduce the incentive to use e-mail for appropriate means, such as operating an e-mail discussion list.
Professor Jonathan I. Ezor
Director, Touro Institute for Business, Law and Technology
jezor@tourolaw.edu [mailto]
How to beat this idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Hey folks, spam is a personal problem. Behind each flood of spam is a single person who decides to send out messages which annoy millions of people, and cause wasted time and excess bad karma. Multiple this by all the hundreds or thousands of spammers (people). This is not a technical, political, economic, or social issue -- it's that one person who clicks the button that launches the spambot. Make the consequences of clicking that button so personally horrific that the person will just not do it.
Re:Is taxation best? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is needed is a new protocol and this has already been talked about. If I knew more about who was developing it I wouldn't mind donating.
Swallowing the spider to catch the fly... (Score:3, Insightful)
Can You Tax? (Score:3, Insightful)
To better illustrate... Take the cliche of "the information superhighway." Except it's not a state-, or even federal-, owned highway. It's a bunch of companies that built big roads on their private property. The companies owning the roads sometimes 'peer' with other companies' roads, allowing people to seamlessly move from one road to another. You can also buy a 'driveway,' or even a private street, from a company. (Representing your Internet connection.) The government doesn't own any of the roads.
Now the government wants to put tollbooths on the roads, and collect a toll from anyone driving on the roads. I really can't see how this idea can possibly be legal.
In addition, I've always felt that it's difficult to define the Internet. It's not too hard to say that when I'm posting to Slashdot, I'm using the Internet. But suppose I use an internal mail server to send mail to someone else using the same mailserver. It never leaves the internal LAN. Am I using the Internet?
Now suppose the mailserver is outside my firewall. Am I on the Internet? What if I have my routing messed up and it goes out the T1 and comes back in, going a single hop to my ISP. Am I using the Internet yet?
Suppose, as is actually the case, my mail server is several states away. If I send mail to someone else on it, am I subject to the tax? But it's a shared server; if I send mail to someone else who hosts there, but isn't related to my site, do I get taxed?
Suppose I VPN into the server. Although some of the data goes over the Internet, my e-mail program 'thinks' it's on the local LAN. Am I taxed?
And what if I own a small ISP with multiple data centers. If I send mail from my house to my local data center, which is sent over a WAN to another data center I / my company owns in another state, is it the Internet?
My goal isn't to name every possible way of getting mail from one place to another. Rather, I'm trying to illustrate the ambiguity of exactly when something's on the Internet versus a private network, when most of the Internet _is_ a private network. But even if exact conditions could be drawn, I still this is _horribly_ flawed because it's a private network. (ie, my "road" analogy)
In addition to the conceptual problems, it has a few serious flaws in practice as well. First, how will they know? Will every mailserver in the country start sending reports to the IRS on who is sending mail?
A second flaw is that e-mail isn't always e-mail, if that makes any sense. If I send mail from Hotmail, and you receive it at Yahoo, neither of us have directly used anything but HTTP. It's not my 'fault' that it got sent over SMTP.
And thirdly, I get a lot of mail that wouldn't be sent if it wasn't free. I'm on nearly a dozen mailing lists; is the mailserver going to be billed for every copy it sends out? Poor bugtraq! I also get mail anytime one of my comments here is replied to, or moderated. Countless other forums I visit do the same. I'm sure that none of these places would continue mailing helpful things like this if they had to pay.
Oh, and there's another little issue... It probably won't be too effective against the spammers. Since many of them already bounce mail through open relays, forging headers, they're probably not going to pay a cent. Sure, after getting a massive 'bill' for the mail the 'victim' might prohibit relaying on their server, but it's definitely not going to end open relays entirely. All it's going to do is destroy the Internet as we know it.
(BTW, after writing all this... Does anyone know if this idea is actually serious? I can't tell you how many e-mails I've received about how Congress is thinking of an e-mail tax to help the Post Office recoup lost money... Is it actually real now?)
Re:Alternatives? (Score:2, Insightful)
Stupid idea... (Score:2, Insightful)
Many spammers will be willing to pay to send me spam email (just as snail-mail spammers do today) and that doesn't mean I'm going to then suddenly want to get all that junk. I have found a solution for snail-mail spam that's been pretty effective-- I refuse to receive mail at my home address and instead use a PO box, and the US mail service doesn't deliver stuff addressed to "resident" to PO boxes (or at least I've never gotten ANY).
And, the same tactic can be applied to phone-spammers. You dial my number, and you get a recording that says "if you know your parties extension, please enter it now." All my friends and business associates, doctors, etc., know my "extension," but the spammers don't, so my phone doesn't ring if it isn't someone that knows me. I can even configure multiple extensions and further identify even the calls I want to get.
The reason these techniques work, is they rely on a two-part address, a "destination" part and an "authorization" part, in effect. With snail-mail, the destination is my PO box address, and the authorization part is my name ("resident", just doesn't get through). With the phone, the primary number is the "destination" part, and the extension is the "authorization" part.
One email equivalent is the use of a white list combined with an auto-reply to those not on the white list that requires they read and comprehend the message and respond with further information that can then put them on the white list automatically (or a blacklist automatically, if desired). It provides the additional authentication needed to weed out spammers. The only drawback is such auto-reply methods don't work when the sender is an automated service itself, such as a mailing list or confirmation message. I'm sure there are other solutions, but taxing the traffic would create all kinds of new problems while not even solving the spam problem. People are willing to spend 18 cents or so to send junk mail to a list of random addresses, I'm sure many will just figure that the cost of sending taxed spam emails out is just a tax writeoff.
Killing off SPAM? (Score:2, Insightful)
Who, of all the bazillions of people using the internet, hurts the most from SPAM?
The ISP(s)
After all, they're bearing the huge and unreasonable SPAM induced costs for
- Additional Bandwidth to receive/send/transit SPAM
- Additional Mail Server requirements
- CPU
- DISK
- Bandwidth
- Memory
- Customer Support for users complaing about SPAM
- abuse@(insert ISP domain here) emails - for those who don't merely route them to
/dev/null
For hundreds/thousands/millions of users/emails, as opposed to the hundreds (maybe thousands) of emails any one particular end user is receiving.Question Two: Who is in the best position to prevent SPAM from being send?
The ISP(s)
Simply because, somewhere along the line, a SPAMer has to send the SPAM through an ISP. (ie transiting their network, even if not actively using the ISP mail server)
In the end, if enough ISPs cared (enough) about solving this problem, they could work smarter rather than simply throwing money/technology at the problem and we'd all have sweeter lives.
Some suggestions include:
- No More ISP "Pink Contracts"
- ISPs actively, collectively and in collaboration preventing identified SPAMers (eg preventing account/ISP hopping)
- disabling dialup accounts (at least) access to outbound SMTP other than the ISPs mail server (which is setup to filter for spam)
And what can we (Joe Sixpack end-user types) do to encourage the ISPs to care about killing off SPAM?Lots of good SPAM info and links (I am not in any associated with SiteTamer, just one of the many good finds on Google)
Tax e-mails my ass - this is a Trojan Horse (Score:1, Insightful)
Next, if any individual receives unsolicited email, he can complain or sue the spammer.
No frickn way should we be taxed for e-mail, we're already paying our ISP for bandwidth used by spammers. Fsck double taxation.
Lessig isn't always so bright (Score:3, Insightful)
So, you've got something that should be illegal... spam. Rather than just making it explicitly illegal and dealing with law breakers, Lessig suggests that everyone pay a tax to solve the problem?
Screw that. I pay for my internet connection. If I want to send out 1 million legitimate (non-spam) email messages a year, I shouldn't have to bear any extra costs not already accounted for in the price of my connection.