Microsoft, Yahoo Investigate Spam Solution 596
bllfrnch writes "The NY Times (account required, yada yada) has an article about the suggestion of email postage to stop the advent of spam. Apparently, both Microsoft and Yahoo! support such an initiative, as they are the largest email service providers. Best quote: ''Damn if I will pay postage for my nice list,' said David Farber, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who runs a mailing list on technology and policy with 30,000 recipients'."
Cha ching? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the worst solution ever and the only reason that MS/Yahoo support it is because of Hotmail/YahooMail. They stand to make huge profits because they host the inboxes of millions of users. Every email received at those accounts would invoice the sender. It's a no brainer for BARRELS OF CASH !!! (tm)
In fact, there already was a good solution [slashdot.org] proposed a few weeks ago, by microsoft no less. Combine it with Spam Assassin the way Spam Interceptor [si20.com] does (replacing the C/R component) and the solution is plausible.
Re:Cha ching? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3, Insightful)
ah... but if spammer x sends a boatload of herbal viagra offers under bob's relay and bob gets a bill... then when they do catch spammer x he can be nabbed under wire fraud laws and be open to all sorts of tasty civil action.
Re:Cha ching? (Score:5, Insightful)
But until then, would you like to be bob?
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nope, nope, nope (Score:5, Informative)
That's naive. You know Ralsky and the like use open relays around the world. He's even contracted some in China. You might tighten a net at best, but eventually you come back to the problem of trying to bill non-USA service providers. Lotsa luck. At best you encourage them to clean up their open relays and implement some decent security, lest their IP traffic be blocked at the border. But this should already be happening. Start locking these things out and they'll get around to fixing things pronto.
Re:Nope, nope, nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's something for you to consider. Who the heck died and made you the tax collector for the world? That's exactly what they'll be saying to Microsoft and Yahoo. This approach would be excedingly painful to negotiate, worse, most of the open relays aren't great big machines, but zombies and small servers with lax security.
A couple years back some sh!t hit the fan regarding Bill Jones run for office in California. Seems some Campaign email was routed through a elementary school computer in Korea [wired.com]. What are you going to do? Send them a bill and have Microsoft or Yahoo goons shut down the school when they don't pay it?
What's needed is cooperation, not this loopy strategy.
Blacklist/Whitelist or roll out a new standard and have major ISP's switch over and at some point block old SMTP Problem solved.
Re:Nope, nope, nope (Score:3, Insightful)
In the recent past, it seemed that the spamming farms weren't giant machines, but they weren't mostly zombies either - wasn't that big US spammer in Texas or Florida just a guy with a T3 and a garage full of medium-sized servers? If that's the case, and you're being pounded with Viagra-grams from a guy with another garage in Indonesia, then this sort of "pay your tax
Re:Nope, nope, nope (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cha ching? (Score:5, Insightful)
he can be nabbed under wire fraud laws and be open to all sorts of tasty civil action.
In how many countries?
Re:Cha ching? (Score:5, Interesting)
Replace SMTP with a more secure protocol. Give a 12 month window for everyone to upgrade their clients. Then make port 25 filtering mandatory for all ISPs.
Failure to comply results in no email gateway for your customers. Simple as that.
Re:Cha ching? (Score:5, Insightful)
also, best answer to spam, don't click on the links in it, don't read it, just delete it, if it wasn't profitable they wouldn't send it out. Sadly dumb people buy shit from telemarketers and spammers.
A fight I would like to watch (Score:5, Funny)
hummm, I think your on to something here.
how 'bout a peer to peer system that uses open relays. Pit the RIAA against the spammers and let them fight it out!
Thats a fight that I would like to watch!
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmm, what kind of spam would this prevent? Open SMTP relays? Forged From: addresses? Sure, we might get rid of some spam that way, but it will not fix the real problem IMO. It's just too easy to setup your own SMTP spamming server to "bypass" this, unless of course we start requiring SMTP auth in
Re:Cha ching? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly it only takes one purchase in a few hundred thousand to make money. This solution requires perfection that will never be acheived in a society which think janet jacksons boob is news (or worse, that it's offensive) and watches the simple life.
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cha ching? (Score:5, Insightful)
and WHO is going to mandate this? SMTP is an ad hoc standard - ie people use it because people use it. If everybody's using it then that's a lot of people using it.
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3, Insightful)
But a standard is only important if people *contintue* to use it. Given a choice of new-MTP which is less than 50% spam and unsecure SMTP which is going to be more than 99% spam, most people will switch after a few months, and SMTP will decline to the status of a mostly historical standard such as gopher. Only hackers and law enforcement ag
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cha ching? (Score:5, Interesting)
The major industry players would be the 'governing body', as you put it. They have historically played together decently since the dawn of DDOS attacks. Before smurf.c, ISP #1 would typically ignore anything ISP #2 said. That is not how things are these days.
No, not simple (Score:5, Informative)
Experience has shown that those who say "simply replace SMTP" do not understand the nature of the problem. It's no coincidence that one of the symptoms of being an anti-spam kook [rhyolite.com] is that your solution involves replacing SMTP
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3)
Did you come up with that all by yourself, or did you have help?
Obviously, it would be ideal if a protocol were designed to replace SMTP that would stop SPAM, unfortunately, it's not as easy as just spending a few minutes writing one up.
Tell the world, here on slashdot, how you would design this SPAM-proof protocol, and watch as everyone tears apart all of your ideas, listing how they just simply wouldn't work in the real world.
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3, Insightful)
I did not want to get into a low-level discussion on how to do it, I figure there are many developers out there, who are far more gifted than I will ever be, can deal with that side of it.
Since we are on the issue, sure. Re-tool SMTP into an authentication based protocol, requiring your account's password to allow email to be accepted by your ISPs mail server, just as with POP3.
It's not l
Re:Cha ching? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I want to setup my own mailserver (not outside the realm of possibility, I'm a sysadmin) what hoops am I going to have to jump through to satisfy the Ultra Secure Email Lobbyists for Efficent Sending of Spam (USELESS)? Who do I go to if I believe someone is illicitly sending spam through their (presumably paid-for) email license?
How do you propose forcing every single ISP that they need to filter port 25? Those within the US? Those outside?
(And why bother if nobody uses SMTP anymore anyway?)
And that's just the start. If someone's machine get hits by a virus which spams people (or allows others to spam through that machine) how do I know that it was some evil guy and not Joe User who got compromised? How many people are even going to go through the expense of legal proceedings for the million-odd users out there with MyDoom on their machine?
Don't get me wrong, I don't think spam is fun. And I don't have a magic solution; I haven't even really thought about the problem.
But it's also clear that you haven't thought about it, either.
So unless you have an actual idea, or can point to someone who does, you're not going to garner that much interest.
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3, Insightful)
Filtering port 25, assuming the updated protocol would utilize the same port.
How about not being an asshat when someone has something to say? I mean, really, I did not post this to sound like Mr Smarty Man III. I posted to inspire people to talk about the issues.
You, on the other hand, are posting simply to point out that I did not go into enough depth and pick at
Re:Cha ching? (Score:4, Interesting)
1) the recipient gets the postage fee
2) the ISP that gets the postage fee provides email / internet access to the user for free
If the ISP gets the cash without providing any FURTHER service, it's nothing more than a cash grab. I would still be likely to maintain a "free" mail account so my friends wouldn't have to pay to email me... I'd just be more likely to filter that heavily for spam.
MadCow.
Re:Cha ching? (Score:2, Troll)
Like hell.
(a) I'm not paying for emails I send to their inboxes unless I get a notice that it will cost money before I send it.
(b) If they insist on this, I'll just keep up my policy of not keeping in contact with morons with hotmail addresses.
Better than that... (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone also has to provide software and systems to meter and invoice email. Gee, who could that be...
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cha ching? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a question:
Why the hell ARE we sill using POP and SMTP? Would it really be that hard to get e-mail users to download the "New, Improved, Spam-Free E-Mail system"? Would developers really be unwilling to implement it?
The big hurdle is fragmentation of the current e-mail system, and the possibility of losing your e-mail address, but it's getting to the point where a large portion (I'm inclined to say "majority") of Internet traffic is spam, and that costs many people a lot of money.
Do like is planne
Do we need this? (Score:5, Informative)
Story also posted on C-Net [com.com] (no account required, yada yada).
What hapened to Yahoo's (as yet unveiled) scheme-to-end-all-schemes [eweek.com] for authenticating mail? IMHO, I think that SPF:Sender will make great strides towards combatting spam, combined with new laws that make spoofing illegal. And AOL is backing it [wired.com], so I think there is a good chance for success, as they are both one of the largest sources of e-mail as well as one of the most commonly spoofed domains.
Mirrors without registration (Score:5, Informative)
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040202-
And here is a IHT article which appears to feature the same quote as the NYT article. Same article? I won't register...
http://www.iht.com/articles/127677.html [iht.com]
Josh.
It's a ridiculous concept (Score:5, Interesting)
Escrow (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not so hard at all; you simply require the payment be placed in an escrow account before the mail server will accept the message. The sender would include some unique token in the message headers that corresponds to the escrow funds.
Read about it here: Selling Interrupt Rgihts [ibm.com]. The article is from 2002, btw, this is hardly a n
Re:It's a ridiculous concept (Score:3, Insightful)
Email isn't free. It costs a minimum of a few hundred bucks to get a computer, plus the cost of even a minimal dial-up account. Anti-spam software costs money. And aside from hobbyists or unemployed folks, spending 40 hours trying to duct-tape some filtering solution on every computer just isn't reasonable.
Spammers have significantly reduced the value of my computer, by taking what was once a useful
snail mail (Score:5, Funny)
How come stamps can't stop all the spam I get through snail mail? Please, make those AOL disks stop!
Ha! (Score:3, Funny)
I realize you're being facetious, but I still don't get 100 AOL discs a day, like I do spam. Hell, if I did, I wouldn't have had to use my nice Snoop CD for my wall mural.
Re:snail mail (Score:3, Funny)
Re:snail mail (Score:3, Funny)
I tried that, and it only changed the spam mail from Credit Card Offers to Billing Companies Mail. I'm not sure if your suggestion really works...
Oh well, maybe I will be able to get this issue resolved after I complete the deal w
Re:snail mail (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, if it still annoys you, the
They Stop Recieving (Score:2)
And if they only recieve postaged email, who would want to use them????
What's more annoying...spam you have to delete(or is somewhat filtered) or the mess of postage. I would say the mess of postage.
smokescreen (Score:5, Insightful)
All this does is prove that eventually, there will be a network of whitelisted SMTP relays that will do more to combat the spamedemic. You don't need to charge money - that's an extra, goofy idea to make profit for a few select corporate interests. It won't fly because millions of systems will refuse to pay the "postage" extortion fee in order to be whitelisted.
I like the computational challenge solution better (Score:4, Interesting)
Spam boxes would be prohibitively expensive due to the heavy requirements for sending millions of spams, and it would have the added benefit of notifying people when their box has been owned due to 100% processor utilization on said owned relay box.
The money option just sounds like pushing for a new revenue stream. To heck with that.
Re:I like the computational challenge solution bet (Score:5, Insightful)
Common sense... (Score:2, Interesting)
Welcome to the new IM revolution (Score:2)
Just enforce the damn laws!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, maybe if the postage goes to further line the pockets of M'soft and Y'hoo, as a likin worked, I can see their true motivation.
I hate spam but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Like I'm the programmer of Gemsites [jcomserv.net], a Slashdot clone. When we register a user, we shoot them an email. So are we going to have to pay money to do that?
Because that would be totally stupid, and it would possibly put an end to discussion websites that require logons to validate users, unless there was a method to bypass the charge for sending email.
The way Microsoft will turn it, would be that we all *should* be paying per email, because of this reason or that reason. Bottom line is Billy Goat Gates on his mountain of cash, trying to pile up more of it.
Postage hasn't stopped Junk mailers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Postage hasn't stopped Junk mailers (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, yeeeah....
Let's see here, I've got around 4 or 5 unsolicited mails here. All of them look to be from legitimate businesses. All of them have paid money to try to solicit me.
Hmm, around 150 unsolicited emails in a single day. I don't dare look at them because of the web bugs, scams, etc. that are present.
Do you think that if postal mail didn't cost anything that I'd be receiving only 4 or 5 unsolicited mailings a day?
I think I have a better solution. (Score:5, Interesting)
What you say? Microsoft would get huge bills because of the abusers of it's Hotmail service? That would be a pity, wouldn't it?
Re:I think I have a better solution. (Score:3, Informative)
Most spam from @hotmail.com addresses doesn't come from Hotmail. A list of what's currently in my inbox:
From: mail.com
Really from: hispeed.ch
From: mail.com
Really from: hispeed.ch
From: osn.de
Really from: adsl.tpnet.pl
From: tiscali.co.uk
Really from: t-dialin.net
From: artnet.com.br
Really from: ny325.east.verizon.net
From: siba.fi
Really from: dsl.pltn13.pacbell.net
From: cellula
Already working? (Score:3, Interesting)
It still costs them though (Score:3, Insightful)
sounds silly to me (Score:5, Insightful)
If email gets a postage fee applied to it, people will stop using it. If I have to pay to send mail to someone at yahoo or hotmail, I would tell that person to get a different email address. No one is going to use email if it has a mandatory fee attached to it. Then again, maybe that's what needs to happen to give people a reason to stop using SMTP
Question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just spitballin' here..
Joe
Re:Question... (Score:5, Funny)
Like SCO's "Linux license"?
Re:Question... (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Yahoo, AOL, MSN, whoever decides that they are going to setup a system where it costs users to send emails.
2. People notice email costs money now.
3. Several million new "free" email services appear on the Internet run by anyone smart enough to setup SMTP services on whatever port is settled on if they start blocking 25, in combination with all the ISPs in the world that didn't go along with (1) above.
4. Yahoo, AOL, MSN, whoever that was doing (1) above
Why can't DNS solve spam??? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Real Question. (Score:2)
Who profits? Who will regulate the size and the postage on that? Would they still agree that this is a great Idea is the US postal service was the one that made a profit?
I am still surprised to this day that there is not a better solution to e-mail. Maybe that is the next killer app....the race is on boys they are just trying to figure out how to make the most money on it.
International Problems (Score:2, Insightful)
After looking at the possible solutions (Score:3, Informative)
Other proposed solutions involve lengthy computations on a sender's machine, which can be trivially verified on the receiver's machine. These will be overcome with faster machines, and spammers can afford better hardware than the rest of us anyway. Legislation is no solution, as the only sort that respects the First Admendment rights of emailers provides the same rights to unsolicited email.
As the saying goes at our local Mensa chapter: wise thoughts may go into your mind, but pultem calidus invado pantorum. At the end of the day postage is the cheapest option, given the cost of enforcement or technology updates.
Re:After looking at the possible solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
What charge are you going to have for sending a piece of mail? Is it a penny? What happens one you get charged a penny for a piece of mail you didn't send? What happens when you get charged a penny a quarter of a million ti
Worst non-solution ever (Score:2)
I better start practicing... (Score:3, Funny)
Now I need to worry about stamps too, just as my eyesight is diminishing.
Score one for the hardware folks! Best idea ever!
Postage -- even more spam! (Score:3, Interesting)
More like... (Score:4, Insightful)
I fail to understand how a scheme that involves the schemes administrators making a profit for every mail sent is going to reduce the amount of mail sent.
Choice Quote (Score:2)
"The very notion that I have to get permission to send you a marketing message doesn't make sense and is not good public policy,"
I think it's GREAT public policy. If I don't want your ads, tough shit.
Yahoo supports this? (Score:3, Interesting)
On a typical day, Yahoo! Mail will have around 100 new spam messages for me, and only two to six of them will make it to my inbox. After a quick setup a month or two ago, I can now check them all with one click and have them identified and deleted as spam with a second click.
While I understand Yahoo! wanting to lessen the burden on their filtering software by supporting postage, I think the sheer cost of such postage would eliminate Yahoo! Mail as a free service and wipe out most of its users in the process. I honestly can't imagine why they would want to use it instead of their already very effective spam traps.
Goodmail just wants to eliminate all free spam (Score:4, Interesting)
Please. That's not the answer.
thad
In the Workplace (Score:3, Insightful)
And if I don't...? (Score:4, Funny)
Remind me again, where's the downside of this?
related story this morning on NPR (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure if it contains any "new" information, but it might be worth a listen.
Not really news.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Today they're trying to "embrace and extend" email.
A Microsoft backed solution will lead to proprietary enhancements, patent litigation, prosecution and the general demise of email other than through Microsoft Proprietary Commercial Products.
Oh and you can forget about sending email from any *NIX like OS, absolutely not from any GPL or otherwise OpenSource OS.
I am not predicting the future, these things have already occurred In other areas of computing, just not email (yet).
You should collect your own fees (Score:3, Interesting)
I wrote it up here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=94145&cid=807
The key points:
You set the fee, and collect it.
You can refund the fee if you wanted the email.
You can add people to a whitelist.
The whitelist uses digital signatures, not easily-forged header fields.
It doesn't really work unless we have a micropayment system that can charge small amounts (five cents) without expensive overhead.
In the discussion attached to that article, one person pointed out that this system could be exploited like this: advertise a job, one that looks like it's really worth applying for. Charge about 20 cents per email to accept resumes. Pocket all the money. It's a perfect small-time fraud scheme: you steal so little, from so many people; who would be motivated enough to check up on whether there was ever really a job to apply for?
I have to say, even without the charging of fees, a whitelist based on digital signatures would be great. You could have a special folder where known-good emails go, and another one for the rest. I'd have my email client play a chime sound when known-good emails arrive, but not the rest.
steveha
the solution results in only spam (Score:5, Insightful)
This pretty much says it all. If there's a postage charged for email then email will become all spam, not spam free.
The first to go will be lists like the above, no free newsletter is going to be able to justify paying postage on mailings of 30,000 or more.
Along with that will be the automated emails. Think /. will still email you when someone responds to your post if it costs them? Think again. You will not get email order confirmation, notice about your rebates, shipping tracking information, or other automated business related email that you want either.
Some people might pay a micro payment on some email, but others will not. Rather than being the killer app for the Internet, email will fall into disuse.
While all of this is going on, the spammers are not going to be slowed one damn bit. If they could be held accountable they would be stopped already. They will either continue to sign up for throw away accounts and then abandon them and not pay for the email, or they will continue to make their deals with shady ISP who damn well know they are spammers and let it slide. If a spammer has a deal with an IPS to send spam you can bet he isn't really going to pay the ISP postage fees. Worse yet, the claim will be made that the spammer is paying postage fees, and that those supposed fees omehow make it legitimate for then to cram your mailbox with spam for the p3nis patch and the paris hilton video xjrf.
And one other effect it will have is that I will certainly not pay to forward all the hundreds of daily spam I get to utc@ftc.org, and other spam fighters will see their complaints of spam dry up too.
In short order, much of the valid uses of email will come to an end because of this "postage", and spammers will continue completely unaffected. And it seems hard to believe that Yahoo and Microsoft don't already understand this.
My Favorite Quote (Score:3, Insightful)
What the hell? It >does make sense from a consumer's perspective, and it might not be good public policy to a corporation because how else will people really know that they want thier product? Unless they actually knew that they needed it, and looked for companies that would produce it?
Post a postage bond... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem can be addressed by putting people at risk of being charged postage. This can be done by requiring that senders post a bond of say 1/10 of 1 cent per item sent.
If you are sending 30,000 pieces of mail a week, your bond would only be $30.00. If people like your email, you will never have to pay the toll, but if they don't like it, then you will be subject it.
The folks that will be caught in this web are spammers and direct marketers. They send millions of spams in the hope that just a few folks will bite. If we raise their cost of doing it above the return, they will be out of business ASAP.
The only way to kill spam, which depends on a frictionless mailing process, is to introduce some friction (i.e. cost) into the system.
Yours,
Jordan
This was not the original idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
1) The user determines how much to charge to read email from someone not on his/her whitelist. For example, I would look at untrusted emails for at least $0.10 a pop.
2) The user can choose not to collect the payment if the unknown sender is someone legitimate, like an old acquaintance, a friend with a new email address, a job offer, etc.
This would effectively kill spam without creating much of an inconvenience to legitimate email.
Stop Email Newsletters; Switch to RSS (Score:3, Interesting)
But another method of delivering news is available to content serializers: RSS feeds. RSS feeds allow for true "push" content delivery like email. But, RSS feeds are not as easy to grasp, access or view as email.
Proposal: create an add-in RSS feed aggregator into common email platforms such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla, Eudora, pine (kidding), etc. Build content creation mechansism into the same email clients with the ability to post the feeds to a public directory (Google? Anyone listening?) with various subscription options on both ends.
This way email could be returned to a person-to-person(s) communication tool for low-volume communication needs; content aggregators could better server their readers/viewers and we can all experience whirrled peas.
Whatever. Anyway, just an idea -- what thinkest thou?
I WILL SAY IT AGAIN... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I WILL SAY IT AGAIN... (Score:5, Insightful)
Free to who, exactly? First you have to pay the CA for the 'privlidge' of using their certificates, then the ISP recieving massive ammounts of e-mail has to get very serious systems to crunch the numbers needed to verify the certificates.
Re:I WILL SAY IT AGAIN... (Score:3, Informative)
That's what is commonly referred to as a "whitelist".
E-mail was never "free" to begin with... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the fact that e-mail has no per-message unit of charge that makes it appear free, and why e-mail lists you want to be on are so cheap to operate, and spam you don't want to get is so cheap to throw at you. It's hard to raise the cost of one without raising the cost of the other.
However, e-mail lists can simply convert to a pull-based mechanism such as a web page or RSS... so I think e-mail list operators who shout down anti-spam measures that interfere with their current operations are just being lazy, they can convert their subscribers to other delivery methods if they want to.
Attention Microsoft and Yahoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Your company advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(x) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Re:Attention Microsoft and Yahoo (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole reason for this "tragedy of the commons" is that sending email to most everybody is free. The way to solve the problem is to make it cost something to get email into most ISPs networks (unless the recipient is an anonymous police tip line, rape crisis center, spam researcher, etc. Those types might continue to monitor legacy SMTP ports.). The cost might be per email, or the price of identifying oneself to a certification authority (enough ID that the police (or lync
Re:Attention Microsoft and Yahoo (Score:3, Interesting)
Any messaging protocol is susceptible to spam if transmission is free and sending a message to someone merely requires knowledge of a fixed, relatively stable piece of information such as an email address. People come up with ways to complicate SMTP and they often don't realize that the replacement p
Re:Attention Microsoft and Yahoo (Score:4, Insightful)
( ) I think you might have something here.
Yep...
I figure this "form" post does make a point, and the conspicuous absence of hope is part of it.
Security risk (Score:3, Insightful)
What an admirable target for viruses, trojans or spyware that would be. The relatively small problem of using e-mail filters to prevent your inbox from clogging up will be replaced with the bigger problem of keeping your money in the wallet.
A better way would probably be to only accept digitally signed mails, that way the sender could always be identified, and if spam was illegal in most countries we would be able to prevent spam with legal processes.
The problem is that there could be legitimate use of anonnymous mail. E.g. who would send an e-mail to the press telling that their company is doing an Enron to the press or even the police if they knew they could be identified.
But I think its easier to learn to live with this disadvantage, than to loose the money in your wallet. After all wistle blowers could still slip a paper note into an unmarked envelope and slip it under the doorstep of the reciever.
A Better Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course it requires a major conversion of the ol' SMTP, but with a huge amount of power concentrated in AOL, MSN, and Yahoo, I think they could come up with a secure email alternative and force everyone to upgrade. It would be painful for a bit, but in the long run I bet it would be better.
I'm all for anonymity in general, but not in my inbox. Post to a discussion or something through an anonymizer if you want that.
Cheers.
Don't pay the ISP. Pay the recipient. (Score:5, Interesting)
Advantages: real email stays free, spam costs, microtransaction standards emerge.
Disadvantages: Microsoft and Yahoo don't make as much money. Sorry.
Let Yahoo and MS charge for email (Score:3, Interesting)
If there was going to be a charge for email, consider how one group of email users, namely universities, would react. First, they'd find a workaround/new protocol so internal "messages" wouldn't be charged for. Next, universities would find a way to exchange "messages" between each other without charges. Then others would pick up on the idea and ...
There are technical solutions, but they won't be adopted until a certain pain threshold is reached. Spam filters have improved a lot lately and have been holding the pain down. Charging for email would ratchet the pain level up immensely.
Yes, there has to be *some* cost for stranger-mail (Score:3, Interesting)
The price, then, is for the right to touch MY mailbox IF you're a stranger -- if you're a mailing list that I've subscribed to, you would go onto my whitelist, and come in postage-free. If you are somebody I know, you go onto my whitelist, and come in postage-free. Yes, for this to work, there has to be some way for the POP server (NOT the client) to maintain per-user whitelists.
If you're not on my whitelist, you need to use a one-time "stampette", whose price would have to be high enough to discourage spammers, but low enough to not bother anybody worthwhile. I'm thinking around a quarter-cent per message, but it wouldn't be fixed by anyone in particular. These stampettes would be issued on a free-market basis, and anyone could set up a micropostage service, provided that the *recipient* whitelisted it. So if somebody were giving away stamps at, oh, a million per dollar, then spammers would use them, and those stamps wouldn't be on my whitelist. Again, it's a free market solution, no government intervention.
ISPs, in this scheme, should issue all subscribers a batch of stampettes (which mail clients would learn quickly to attach, if needed). A thousand for a quarter-dollar (or quarter-Euro) would be more than enough for a month, don't you think? How many strangers (or first-time correspondents) do you write to?
Re:hiJacked account? (Score:2)
Re:Postage? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Postage? (Score:3, Informative)
The media accounts are wrong. Microsoft is pushing a processor cycles idea. The NPR interview [npr.org] with Ryan Hamlin the GM of the anti-spam division is a more accurate example of what they have presented.
The accreditation scheme that Microsoft and Yahoo are considering mean you pay for sending spam. You do not pay for sending email. It is like ironport bonded sender, you spam, you forfeit part of your bond. You no spam y
Re:Hash Cash and standards (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Heresy? (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is that you're already paying for your internet access, which covers email, web browsing, and everything else. That's because it's all the same to the computer. It's all just little packets of data blasting through your ethernet cable. Now if you sign up for some special email service, they could charge you for using it, but you shouldn't have to pay extra to your ISP because of the type of data you're sending. A packet is a pac
Re:Old news, still a solution to seriously conside (Score:3, Insightful)
The REASON we have spam is because some stupid people are BUYING the CRAP the spammers are selling.