Yahoo Revives Pay-Per-Email, With Charitable Twist 287
holy_calamity writes "Yahoo research have started a private beta of a scheme that resurrects the idea of charging people to send email to cut spam. Centmail users pay $0.01 for each message they send, with the money going to a charity of their choice. The hope is that the feel good effect of donating to charity will reduce the perceived cost of paying for mail and encourage mass adoption, making it possible for mail filters to build in recognition of Centmail stamps."
Oh well (Score:5, Funny)
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante (x) charitable
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
( ) 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
( ) 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
(x) 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
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(x) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) 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
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam? (Score:2, Funny)
Ohh... someone like Yahoo will do that for us. Got it. Just pay my monthly dues or licensing fees and then a low $.01 per email and it's all good. Glad this is such a humanitarian effort aimed at cleaning up our interwebs and not a huge cock-up out for profit, because then it would just be unethical...
Re:Cost TOO MUCH! (Score:5, Funny)
I'd rather it was $1 per email. That might cut down on all those forwarded chain emails my relatives keep sending me.
Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam? (Score:3, Funny)
Please forward this (Score:5, Funny)
This message is to raise money for a litte girl with cancer.
Every time someone forwards this email it's tracked, and AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Disney will donate $0.01.
The more people you forward to, the more money we can raise! So please...look into your heart and just take a few seconds to forward this message to everyone in your address book.
If you choose to be a meany, and not forward this email, you will die in 5 years, and so will everyone in your family.
Re:(almost) spam-free (Score:2, Funny)
Spellcheck. 80% of spam has beautifully awful spelling.
Which leaves about 95% of legitimate email with beautifully awful spelling
Re:Okay, I'll play this game. (Score:1, Funny)
To be a not for profit all you have to do is- not make a profit.
Set up your charity, then distribute the penny back to the sender as an act of goodwill. You've given away all of your donations, you've not made a profit.
I'd love to be the IRS tax auditor on this one:
IRS: "so you received 10,000,000 donations this year?"
CHARITY: "yes, but they were only for a penny each"
IRS: "Where did you keep these funds?"
CHARITY: "We didn't. We gave every penny away, to about 5,000,000 people. We have receipts, you can look through them all."
IRS: *palm to forehead*
Assure vs Insure vs Ensure... (Score:2, Funny)
As an insurance agent, I assure you (I promise you) that there is no way in hell we would insure you (provide indemnification coverage against a specified loss) against getting spam. The only way to ensure (make sure) you don't get spam is to turn your computer off.
If your dictionary tells you that "assure", "ensure" and "insure" are synonymous and, moreover, interchangeable, please send it directly to the nearest paper recycling mill and buy yourself a set that doesn't retard your language skills.
Cue the "languages evolve" crowd. Languages may evolve, but evolution through ignorance and stupidity is hardly evolution at all; the words exist with their entirely different meanings for a reason: to convey an idea to another party. If that idea ends up being open to interpretation due to the use of ambiguous words, odds are you have failed to convey your idea entirely.
Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam? (Score:4, Funny)
mail come in physical form?