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."

How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[eldavojohn]

Subtitle of CentMail:

Do Good. Fight Spam.

So it sounds like an 'opt-in' program for doing otherwise would be suicide by a mail provider. And since it's opt-in, I highly doubt the spammers will be doing the opting. So unless your penny is going to an anti-spam organization, how are you fighting Spam?

Also, I'm not too clear on how this would work. Wouldn't it require a certificate-like central authentication server? And wouldn't this increase in traffic just exacerbate the situation of too much traffic? Especially if all Spam starts to come with fake 'stamps.'

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[FlyingSquidStudios]

It seems to me that the only way to truly insure that the receiver gets 100% spam-free mail is to intercept and sort it before it's received with humans doing the sorting. Even the most robust spam filters get overcome fairly regularly. I know I don't want anyone reading my mail but me.

$10 for guaranteed delivery to 1,000 users?

[ickleberry]

Now here's something both the spammers and the ISP's will love. I presume somewhere in their long-term plan is a means of getting rid of all those pesky renegades who run their own email server and don't opt into this scam

Gosh.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm glad that goodwill and fuzzy feelings are able to cut transaction costs; because they'll be the real killer at $0.01 a pop.

I assume, because of this problem, that they'll either be billing you when your tab reaches some worthwhile value, and trusting you in the meantime, or forcing you to buy in large blocks ahead of time(which would be super annoying, goodwill or no).

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[mcgrew]

So it sounds like an 'opt-in' program for doing otherwise would be suicide by a mail provider

I read this with alarm; I have a yahoo (actuallt rocketmail) account and I use it for slashdot. If this becomes popular I can see yahoo charging for all their mail services.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Darkness404]

However there are -tons- of legitimate reasons to have more than one e-mail account. For example, a business might want to have one for each employee, so there is one, another would be a personal e-mail, and another one would be an "internet" e-mail for occasions where you might not want to reveal your real name (forum registration, etc). Plus there are many occasions where you forget either a username or password and when you try to register for a new account it helpfully tells you there is already an account for the e-mail address yet won't send you the username. Another reason is for convenience, I used Yahoo mail for a while but then I realized that I might as well get a Gmail account because I searched Google, had Google as my homepage and never used Yahoo except to check mail.

And also this will create problems with students/poor people who while they can afford the "stamps" might not have a credit card to buy them. And finally, this is unethical because the cost of a single message is -far- less than one cent, similar to how US carriers charge 10 cents or more per text message when it costs them nothing to send.

Re:$10 for guaranteed delivery to 1,000 users?

[Darkness404]

An even scarier twist would be if legislation makes it -illegal- to discriminate against mail sent this way with a spam filter (probably thrown in with some form of net neutrality) making it a guaranteed delivery, illegal to block.

around we go

[mugnyte]

  Either the authentication traffic kills us, or the spammers clone any sort of component embedded in email to lend credibility. If you can fake an email as spam, you can fake a stamp.

  If Centmail stamps are auto-verified, then either an API must authenticate the key and authorize the action - which is a lot of traffic - at a single server/authority, or we disperse it. With dispersal, possibly for abuse goes up, and then we have new keys arriving which means more traffic. We of course can't use keys per mail, but perhaps per-sender. This is still a huge number of keys to be managed.

  Filters work as a form of decentralized authentication, where the proper "key" is passing the filter, which is slowly morphing from user feedback. This seems to me to degrade over time, as the filters cannot change quick enough, still weighing-in prior exclusions while accepting new ones. There's a fair amount of noise to ignore while people mark email they don't like as SPAM and similarities are extracted.

  Blacklists and Whitelists are just filters with a central authority, but open to more abuse and too coarse-grained to remove much, as spammers hop or spoof origins quickly.

  Overall, I don't feel like bolt-on public systems can categorize the messages other than how we're doing it today. If we had a re-do on email, it might involve some encryption for senders, certificate stamps, and a trust level of pathways and a distributed authorization system with feedback to violators. But we're a long ways off from that.

This has all been discussed for years.

Okay, I'll play this game.

[Ollabelle]

I'll set myself up as a charity, and have the system pull money out of my account, and put into the my other - er, the charity's - account. Now all my spam is blessed.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Culture20]

I predict it spiraling out of control as different parties try to "get in on the action" and see a chance to turn a profit instead of just giving the money to charity.

Yahoo is betting on that. The steps they'll take:

1. Charge 1 cent per email opt-in sent to charitable org
2. Pretend 1 cent isn't enough while the real reason is that other email systems don't implement similar setup and because spammers don't opt-in. Charge 2 charitable cents per email
3. Charge 3 charitable cents per email. Make the system opt-out.
4. Make the system mandatory. Reduce price to 2 charitable cents per email. The people rejoice!
5. Now that everyone's been used to paying money per email, raise price to 3 cents, but only 2 cents of the charge are donated (processing donations takes money from Yahoo).
6. ...
7. Collusion between Cell phone companies and ISPs on the price of SMS/email: 25 cents per each. US Postal Service goes postal and wants in on the deal.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[HikingStick]

The compromised bots would not likely ever incur the "postage" charge, because they're not going to relay through the Yahoo! mail server. They are going to run on a shadow server, sending out as many messages as they can. The only way the pay-per-email message might snag spammers and bots is if this were done at the ISP level, and if it were done by monitoring the SMTP traffic flows. [I, for one, don't think that would be a good situation.]

Re:Okay, I'll play this game.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is the first legitimate objection to this idea I have seen.
I like the "penny per" idea, but what's to stop a spammer from making themselves their own charity?

Instead of a charity...

[Hungus]

Instead of sending the 1c to a charity, why not send it to the receiver? I receive some x number of mail's per day and send y , but the number is small and the x-y is even smaller. However for the spammer x is probably similar, where y is 8+ orders of magnitude higher resulting in a financial disincentive to spam. Commercial email is incentivized to reduce its mailing lists and target more accurately, yet is not significantly punished for its high output to input ratio.

Re:Oh well

[MillionthMonkey]

I initially wrote and posted it here in 2003. [slashdot.org] Note the lack of a bitchslap against challenge-response schemes that hadn't yet become popular:

( ) Spammers pass all your Turing Tests

or something like that.