Yahoo Revives Pay-Per-Email, With Charitable Twist

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."

Re:Oh well

[dreeves]

We did try to address these common objections. See Section 3.2 of the paper: http://centmail.net/centmail.pdf [centmail.net]

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Chabil Ha']

Except that SSL was never intended as a way of establishing identity, even though it is a feature of it. Its purpose is and always has been a means of encrypting communication. As your valid reasons indicate, anyone using it to identify is absolutely peanuts.

Re:Oh well

[CannonballHead]

The closest I can find to an "original" is this one [craphound.com], which is linked to a lot.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[betterunixthanunix]

Except that part of establishing secure communications is authenticating the other end, or else you are vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack; that is why SSL has a certificate system. If the only intention was to have a means of encrypting communication, then there would be no reason for SSL to have such a complicated protocol that includes identification and capabilities management.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[digitig]

The spam-fighting method is to build a sufficient number of email accounts that work that way and start black-listing every email that does NOT work that way and/or is not on your contact list. Not that hard to do.

Yeah, maybe you can afford to send new customers to /dev/null, but I sure can't.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[drukawski]

The only way to truly insure you don't get spam is to turn your computer off. There have always been con-artists in one form or another, and as long as people are generally selfishly driven there always will be.

Re:How stupid....

[macraig]

I've used GMail since its inception. To this day I still despise its MANDATORY antispam system, which continues to vex me with false positives that I'm hard-pressed to find in the deluge of actual spam in the Spam "folder".

This is compounded by the well-known bug in GMail that causes the system to ignore periods in addresses when it is delivering mail... in other words, any mail addressed to [e-mail] winds up being delivered to [e-mail] instead (perhaps only if there's no actual unique blahblahblah account). Because of that bug, I get MORE THAN TWICE the amount of spam that I "should" be receiving, because GMail is delivering mail to my Inbox that wasn't actually addressed to me!

GMail is great, but it also sucks, and sucks hard, at EFFECTIVE spam control. I can do much better with PopFile and localized filtering, but GMail won't even let me do it since their filtering can't be bypassed or disabled (you can't "opt out").

That's precisely why I found the original comments not credible. He was either clueless or disingenuous.

Re:How stupid....

[Tsujiku]

That's not a bug, it's a feature (for real). To their system, [e-mail] is the same account as [e-mail], and it was designed that way intentionally.

Re:How stupid....

[Anonymous Coward]

A) You can create a filter to bypass gmail's spam controls entirely if you'd rather use your own

B) the "ignoring dots" is a feature, not a problem.. And gmail does not allow accounts to be created that would cause a conflict. john.smith and johnsmith cannot both exist.

Re:How stupid....

[Anonymous Coward]

All Gmail address disregard the periods entirely. [e-mail] is identical to [e-mail] and [e-mail].

If you own [e-mail], none of the address above exist, I guarantee you.