IBM Researcher Offers an E-Stamp Spam Solution 449
UnanimousCoward writes "This Internet Week article describes a research project by Scott Fahlman that looks to limit spam using e-stamps. Here is more detailed description of the system under his CMU homepage along with a link to the original paper." As crappy as it sounds, charging some tiny fee per email would cut spam dramatically. 207 of the buggers so far today. Hundreds of megs a month. I'd love to see something done.
i doubt it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:i doubt it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:i doubt it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:i doubt it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:junk mail and costs (Score:4, Insightful)
Not using email is NOT THE ANSWER to spam.
Not much more! This is a bad idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
The 2.3 cents per envelope paid in postage can hardly be the largest cost of real life junk mail. TRANSFAL, bud. You could jack up the costs of email to real life levels and you would get the same amount of email, because it's still cheaper than TV, billboards, radio and all that. In fact it's the only way to reach many people so anoyed with adverts that they no longer watch TV listen to radio and make laws against billboards. They will come and they will pay.
In any case the aproach is completely backward.
I'll pay a stamp for Email when the US government or some private company sets up a system just as good as real life mail. If someone can devise such a system where there are NO ACCESS charges whatsoever and all the work but writing the mail is done for me, a stamp might be a reasonable way to pay. As it is, I pay a private company for wires to my house and a private company on top of that to be able to read the web, and another to host and another to have a name. I do not feel like paying yet another party just to connect to another computer on port 25. No, 1,000 times NO. Paying for each and every email I send would be like having the worst of all worlds for email.
Shame on anyone who thinks a novel system that extracts your money will do anything more than extract money in the long run. Rember paying the cable company for advert free TV? Now you simply pay for TV. Anyone who pays extra for email will simply pay extra for email. In the end, the company running the system will be bought and you will get your censored adverts.
The only real solution is to make spam against the law and fine those who send it. A fine on those who receive it is stupid.
Re:i doubt it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:i doubt it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:i doubt it (Score:3, Funny)
Re:i doubt it (Score:3, Informative)
Not gonna happen (Score:4, Interesting)
Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited email. (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the article, the idea is to whitelist your friends and mailing lists, and then you personally choose to set a fee that you charge for accepting mail from any person/business unknown to you.
So basically, you get paid for receiving email, but you only need to pay if you are in the habit of sending unsolicited email to random strangers.
Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's really the case, then I'm all for it! Hell, I'll gladly accept every piece of spam the send, as long as they send me some cash for it as well!
Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema (Score:5, Insightful)
Only unknown addresses will be charged, you could probably extend known addresses to include entire domains. Finally, if there's a third party involved, I would think it would be trivial to refund these charges from legitimate people. Finally, you don't HAVE to charge for unknown recipients.
And if the costs are so low that it does not bother me then it will not bother the SPAMMERS either to pay the amount.
Wrong, it WILL bother and even stop many spammers. They're business model completetly depends on their ability to send millions of e-mail messages a day without cost. If you start incurring costs, you've just blown their business model. Even if it's half a cent. Let's see, what's that crazy thing called again? Oh yeah MATH:
$.005 X 1,000,000 messages = $5000
So for each mass mailing of that size, the spammer is paying $5000. Currently a lot of the big guys are sending out over 10 million a week! Hello? That's a log of money!
Now maybe they'll have to actually FOCUS thier mailings and maybe even (gasp!) start pushing products that aren't of dubious value and legal content. Junk is here, but we don't have to tolerate this amount or content.
People won't pay... (Score:5, Insightful)
A better solution would be to make people register for a signing certificate and require email software to sign all messages. At least that way people would know who sent spam... and a national spam blacklist could be created for certs that get a certain number of complaints filed against them.
Re:People won't pay... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:People won't pay... (Score:3, Interesting)
Mail clients should just give the option to deny people without a proper certificate. If certificates are hard to get than blocking a domain of certificates would help block the amature spammers.
Re:People won't pay... (Score:2)
Re:People won't pay... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't be silly, paying for things that used to be free is how the internet economy survived to become the thriving, economic powerhouse it is... um... today... er, that is....
Well, maybe you're right.
Re:People won't pay... (Score:3, Insightful)
Especially in light of the fact that probably 99 percent of everyone who uses email doesnt give a shit about spam. Whatever they get, they ignore, just like they hang up on telemarketers and throw junk mail into the trash can. Of course those costs dont stop marketing. It's just part of life.
To stop spam by charging for email, you'd have to make email prohibitively expensive --- when was the last time you we
People will pay... (Score:3, Informative)
If that's so, then why are the major consumer ISPs currently in an advertising battle over who has the best spam filtering? I can't hardly turn on the television these days without seeing an ad from AOL, Earthlink, or MSN touting "now with better spam blocking!" or "protects your kids' email from porn spam!" The one with the butterfly dumping the spammers down the hole is kind of funny, no
Re:People won't pay... (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you sure most people don't care? They may not care about receiving spam in the general sense, but I suspect there's a great majority who either oppose or fear pr0n (and other individually-decided offensive content) and virus/script/hack-carrying spam.
I don't give a Bender's shiny metal ass about snail-mail spam because it can't hurt me. And it's easy to filter and toss or recycle. And I only get about 3 pieces per day.
Spam, OTOH, usually comes daily by the gross and for most people without advanced filtering tools, sorting the good from the bad usually means having to open some of the more ambigously-titled pieces. And then you get into trouble because a linked pr0n image hits your work web proxy and...
GTRacer
- Telemarketers, however, should ESAD.
e-stamp to stomp out spam? I think not (Score:3, Insightful)
The spammers will simply pass the cost through to their customers who, granted, might become more discriminating in response but it will not stop them.
Bulk Mail Rates? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah. Sure.
How much crap do you get a day in your postal mailbox? How much of that was sent with a $0.37 First-Class stamp? How much of that was sent with heavily discounted postage because of its "bulk mail" status? (I won't even go into how ordinary citizens end up subsidizing this crap, even junkmail from large companies that could afford a full-cost stamp).
How much you wanna bet that some kind of postage on email won't make much difference, as the cost will either be so low that most won't care, or there'll be ways for companies to get out of it (or to get a much cheaper rate)?
Sure, it might cut back some. Maybe. But remember how the big junkmail senders got cheaper rates in the first place: Lobbyists. So I wouldn't expect it to last.
Re:Bulk Mail Rates? (Score:3, Interesting)
About one per month. I'd be happy to get only one piece of spam by email each month.
Not quite sure you've grabbed the concept. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not quite sure you've grabbed the concept. (Score:2)
I see what you're getting at. I suppose it's a valid argument.
I just choose not to believe it.
(really, though, even $0.37 is a bargain for what it's doing, compared to the cost to send something FedEx Ground...)
Re:Not quite sure you've grabbed the concept. (Score:3, Insightful)
There are laws forbidding private carriers from getting into the first-class mail business, actually -- and from charging less than the USPS does for certain classes of express mail. The Postal Service is a government-enforced monopoly. The Constitution requires the government to operate post offices -- but it does not require that they be given an otherwise illicit monopoly.
Re:Bulk Mail Rates? (Score:3, Informative)
How much crap do you get a day in your postal mailbox? How much of that was sent with a $0.37 First-Class stamp?
Bulk mail has different rates mostly because the sender pre-sorts the mail and saves some work for the postal-office. It has nothing to do with subsidizing, in fact bulk mail helps subsidize the post office.
How much you wanna bet that some kind of postage on email won't make much difference, as the cost will e
Re:Bulk Mail Rates? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Bulk Mail Rates? (Score:2, Interesting)
When we mail letters, pay bills, etc., we pay 37 cents (or has it gone up again? I've lost track) per item.
When bulk-mailers mail crap to us at home, they pay a helluva lot less -- maybe like 12-25 cents per item (cost, not savings).
This despite the fact that most of the people sending us the crap are big corporations with huge budgets to pay for such mailings. The same for magazines -- it costs Time a lot less
No chance in hell (Score:5, Insightful)
a) I'm used to having FREE email
b) Once you start charging for something, it's only a matter of time before the fees go up and up as high as it can "sustainably" go, and like stamps we'd be seeing it rise every couple of years.
Re:No chance in hell (Score:5, Insightful)
So you don't have an ISP? And you're not paying semsesterly network fees at school (possibly rolled into a general student or residence hall fee)?
Really now, there is a much simpler solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really now, there is a much simpler solution. (Score:2)
Now that world + dog is online, we have all sorts of ne'er do wells screwing around in there, causing all sorts of trouble.
I'm pretty sure that the internet would not be designed as it is, given hindsight; there are just too many ways to scre
This does not work (Score:2)
When this happens to you is really suck becaus suddenly you are getting thousands of bounced email s back - one for every invalid email address that the spammer tries.
Why Pay? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why Pay? (Score:3, Funny)
Free, and doesn't work. I've just upgraded our servers to SA 2.5, and while it catches a lot of obvious spam, spammers have started to adapt. I'm now getting one or two very chatty emails a day telling me about sites a 'friend' of mine has visited. They look like real emails, and could well be if it weren't for the fact that I don't know the people the come from, and none of my friends write to me telling me how well the viagra th
Paying to stop spam.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Paying to stop spam.... (Score:3, Insightful)
There comes a point at which spam becomes uneconomical for the *sender*, which is probably around the 0.1 to 0.2 cents level using some guesswork. So the email most of us send wouldn't amount to a whole heap of cash.
Re:Paying to stop spam.... (Score:4, Funny)
I'd like it better if there were laws that forced convicted spammers to undergo penis reduction surgery.
Hell, with the amount of size-increasing pills at their disposal, they can't claim its cruel or unusual, can they now?
Look into Habeas (Score:5, Interesting)
Check it out. I don't use it personally, one of the mail lists I'm on uses it.
Re:Look into Habeas (Score:5, Insightful)
No, this doesn't prevent spam. This automates hitting the delete key. The spam is still sent, processed, received, but hidden from your view at the last possible moment.
I'm not saying filtering doesn't have it's place, but it's a stopgap measure that treats only the symptoms, while the disease rages on.
Bad Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Case in point, bad idea.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine a world were everyone walked around with sound-proof ear muffs and charged you a penny for them to listen to what you have to say. Would you ever know what was going on? Worse, imagine a world where only certain people did this? Would those people or the people who didn't have ear-muffs be
Nice to see an implementation (Score:5, Interesting)
A question remains: my Social Implications teacher also teaches Telecommunications Law. She maintains that this sort of thing will open a floodgate of per-use fees on our internet access that we won't want.
I guess that by having a third party do it (instead of the ISP), we can get around that problem for now. Does anyone have any idea if she's right, and if so if it could affect this as well?
Re:Nice to see an implementation (Score:3, Interesting)
While that would be a good idea, it is not what is described by the article. Of course people are going to whine if they have to pay for this, and in particular if they have to pay for each mail they send. If implementing this would require the price of an internet conneciton to be increased by $1 per month, I'd be happy to pay. However the ISPs must understand, that they are not supposed to make money from each mail. The money are supposed to be payed to the recipient,
Re:Nice to see an implementation (Score:3, Insightful)
And as I point out above, even a penny per email gets damned expensive in a hurry if you really USE email as your major
Re:Nice to see an implementation (Score:3, Funny)
Linux Kernel Mailing List here I come! Free money!
Not necessarily pay (Score:3, Insightful)
Your ISP could foot the bill for the "estamps" and each email you send could get marked in this way making the message "legitimate" going through their email servers.
Though the spammers themselves could easily get around this. Unless, however, every ISP clubbed together to create a list of legit stamp-issuers and not allow anything unstamped to pass through. their relays.
Though this is just filtering based on an email field that does not exist.
MS would probably hijack it and bastardise it anyway
Just me thinking out loud.
Great... (Score:2)
There is a way to make this work (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only would it cut down on SPAM, people would think through their emails before writing as many flames and time-robbers.
it wouldnt work (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:it wouldnt work (Score:2)
Wont' work (Score:4, Interesting)
"When a message arrives at my machine or mail-server, it is examined. If the sender is on my accept list, the message is passed through to my in-box."
spammers do this with forged email addressess all the time... and pass trough whitelists all the time as well.
my personal spam solutions (Score:4, Informative)
I own my own domain name so any email address at my domain gets to me. So when I register for stuff, I use unique email addresses every time (i.e. amazon@mydomain.com, circuitcity@mydomain.com). So if anyone SELLS my email address, I know because I start getting spam at a particular address. So anyways... here are my two simple solutions:
1. For every piece of spam that I get, I send a 5 copies back to the mail relay that sent me the mail. If they are going to annoy me, at least I will chew up some of their bandwidth and CPU cycles.
2. And if someone "sold" my address, then I also send 5 copies of the spam to the rat-bastard seller. I hope to chew up their resources as well.
If EVERYONE did this, I think it would totally crash the offenders machines and clog up their big fat internet pipes.
what about mailing lists ? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's so silly to see so many complex anti spam solutions, if all we need is jurisdiction aruond the concept. The biggest issue with spam is that tere's no law forbidding it. Fix that, and trigger happy lawyers will take care of the problem.
Why not? (Score:2)
And then that moves me to overseas operation spam. Well, there should be some online despository for ISP admins to get together on, corolate on who is sending what spam from where
Personal Stamps (Score:3, Interesting)
I can issue stamps with as many tags as I like and configure my email front end to deal with messages based on the stamps
"Friends"
"I am a customer of company X"
"I work for A and buy from B"
"I work for A and sell to C"
"Registered at site M to enter contest"
"Tech web site registration"
"News web site registration"
"Entertainment web site registration"
In the event you went on holiday you could even set up forwarding based on the message stamps.
What about automated emails? (Score:4, Interesting)
How would a pay-per-email fee affect people like this? What about the "Forgot Your Password?" links on sites that email your registered email?
I think something like this would hit the Internet a lot harder than people think, since most people just seem to be concerned with Joe User at home sending 50 joke mails a day.
SASE: Self-Addressed Stamped "envelope" for email? (Score:3, Interesting)
Easy. Add a field to the form, into which you paste your own "stamp" for the site to use on the email that is sent to you.
Same method co
A system that I've thought of a while back. (Score:3, Interesting)
End result?
The average email user breaks even if they send as much as they recieve. Someone who sends much more than they recieve is only out $1. Legitimate buisnesses will only pay about $0.05 per sale on average. Still peanuts. However, a spammer that sends out 10,000,000 emails ends up having to fork out $100,000. Still alot cheaper than snailmail spam, but you KNOW they'll be checking thier lists alot more carefully and targeting a bit more precisly than the sun. When that 1 in 10,000==success plan starts running $100/success. It cuts into the profit margin. They'll want to reduce that to a 1 in 1000 for the higher return spams (which are probably 1 in 100,000 or more anyways).
If you really wanted to make money by doing nothing each day, with that setup it'd be possible just by recieving the spam
Robert Cringely also said something similar (Score:5, Informative)
Though I have to say, neither one are originators of the idea - I've seen it plenty of times before, but this IBM guy is closer to the implementation of a system.
logistical nightmare (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:logistical nightmare (Score:2)
Is this email to grandma really worth $0.01? (Score:2)
But, even then, I'm not convinced customers would embrace this or any other "e-stamp solution."
Microsoft's Penny Black Project (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A very bad thing (Score:3, Funny)
Using CPU Time (Score:3, Informative)
To sum up, requiring a cpu intensive calculation to send off email would limit the number of emails that a person could send off per day (a 10 second calculation would limit a spammer to 8k messages per day, but would still be bearable for you and me).
Won't stop the tide, but could help stem it's growth. Would raise the cost for sending spam dramatically. Bulkmail renderfarms anyone?
Filtering (Score:2)
No sir, I don't like it (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't even begin to open that door, you fools. We must make it illegal to send spam, then from there, make it illegal to send unsolicited postal mail, solicit on your doorstep, and make unsolicited commercial/charity/political telephone calls.
It's my phone, my email inbox, my mailbox, and my doorstep. Fuck off if you think you have a right to use it at will to sell your crap.
A problem with this. (Score:2)
everything you've listed, spam, telemarketing, stopping by the front door, etc equate to someone wanting to say something. It may be something as stupid as 'make money now' or 'enlarge your penis' but it's still protected speech just as much as those guys in white hats that run around in the south.
So they'd challenge it under the first ammendment law.
Now, I'm all fo
I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
This approach means that spammers have to pay for a charity stamp for every single spam they send out. And that would undoubtedly eat into their profits, and prevent the most ineffective spams from being sent.
But here, I think the developer of the idea pushes the logic too far. He says, "The whole spam industry depends on spam being free to the sender," Fahlman says. "If we change the social rules of E-mail just a tiny bit, I think the whole problem of spam goes away."
I think it's far more logical to conclude that the problem won't go away at all. But it might become more manageable, because it will force spammers to only launch campaigns that can return a profit after charity stamp expenses. In essence, spamming will become more like bulk mail. It costs Land's End a dollar a catalog for their postal mailings, and they probably get a 3% response rate, but the profits they make on that clothing is worth continued and highly targeted mailings. The same dynamic may one day be true with spam. And I'd rather get 30 emails a year from reputable companies like Land's End than 3000 emails a year from Viagra pushers.
I've heard a variation of this idea, and I think it might in fact be Fahlman's work, and that the Internet Week article sort of missed the boat on this reporting. In the variation I've heard, the "charity stamp" is expensive, say a couple of dollars. This system would create a social agreement that redeeming a charity stamp is sort of a slap in the face. Your best friend from elementary school could email you, and you'd be perfectly entitled to redeem his charity stamp since he's not on your whitelist. No reasonable person would burn friends and family like this. But what fun it would be to burn spammers this way, having each unwanted email result in a dollar being sent to your favorite charity!
I think this kind of optional redeeming of charity stamps is the core of what would make this idea work. But we'd need to set up a new email/micropayment infrasture to make it possible, and couple it with strict laws that spammers trying to evade the charity stamp face criminal penalties. Creating a new system like this would pose enormous problems, but it sounds workable. I think the bottom line is that the spam problem can almost certainly be reigned in, but whatever approach is used, it's going to take big money, government intervention, and a partial redesign of how email servers currently operate.
As for me, I recently started using the Bayesian filters in Mozilla 1.3's email client. I can't say enough good things about how well this has worked--I've reclaimed my email box. It used to take me ten minutes or more a day to delete spam. But Mozilla does it with uncanny accuracy, and probably with fewer mistakes than I would make if I'm hurrying.
Re:I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong (Score:2)
I think the micro payment's issue isn't there. You just buy $5 worth of stamps from the charity or OS project or your choice. You wouldn't have to buy the stamps one at a time.
As far as changing the servers, that too wouldn't be needed since the whole process could be handled on the client side. If PGP for email (and unfortunately webbugs) can be implemented without altering the email servers, then certainly this kind of sys
There are better solutions (Score:3, Insightful)
The article proposed to maintain a white list of trusted addresses. Anyone not on the white list would have to pay money and (manually) obtain a token allowing to send a message to a mail box. I would say this is too difficult.
I think obtaining a token manually is sufficient for all spam-fighting purposes. If it can be assured that the e-mail was sent to me individually by a human being, then it's worth my effort of looking at the subject line. So, if the sender is not on my white list, my server could reply with an automatic message something like "Your message has not been delivered. Visit the page http://.../?id=123456789, read the number in the image and enter it in the box". That would cut pretty much all spam.
I know at least one free e-mail vendor who implemented this technique. It's simple and easy and still not widely used. I bet the idea from the article would suffer the same fate.
Am I the only one tired of hearing Taco whine? (Score:2)
But you know what, if you actually put forth an effort to not splash your e-mail address around, you can avoid enormous amounts of spam before they ever reach you.
I've had one main e-mail address at a major e-mail/web provider for just over four years. I am constantly checking it and I use it for virtually all of my e-mail correspondence.
Right now the spam is the worst it's ever been for me; I get about 12 a day.
sedawkgrep
Better solution already proposed (Score:5, Interesting)
This takes a few millisecond to calculate the answer and its is trivial to check. One could dial up the problem strength as needed.
For normal users this is a trivial cost since my CPU is definitely idle many many milliseconds every time I send an e-mail. But for bulk senders its a problem.
It could be done either by the relaying e-mail servers or as long at the final recipeint. The latter is probably superior as long as forged sender info does dont create accidental DOS attacks.
In any event, it adds a trivial burden to the amount of internet traffic, and given a reduction in spam traffic over time would save on total traffic. And It cost nothing since it uses unexploited resources. And it would I believe kill any centrally served spam dead.
In fact one could actually get useful work out of this.
Imagine this scheme. To get your stamp of approval you have to get a ticket issued from some grid computing server that supplies the mini-tasks. For example, I might sign up with some service that issues mail stamps in return for doing 1 second of calculation on some easily stated but hard to solve problem (prime searching, etc...)
Use ASK (Score:4, Interesting)
It works great. It works by requireing a response the first time someone emails you. They repond to an automated email and are whitelisted. Since spam has it's replay lines forged the spammer never replys to the automated email and you don't get any spam.
Since I have started using this 2 months ago I have gotten 2 spam emails. That is down from about 40 a day.
The other bonus is that unlike filters if someone needs to get an email to you they will and it wont accidentally be junked.
saddam==spammers (Score:4, Funny)
Before you get your panties in a wad... (Score:4, Interesting)
One method is especially interesting, the CPU-based scheme [microsoft.com] in which "the sender must solve a recipient-defined puzzle in which computation of the solution is moderately and provably hard." If that were the case you wouldn't even notice if you're sending one email, but a spammer certainly would if he tries to send out 1,000,000 at a time.
How to End Spam and learn to play the flute, too (Score:4, Interesting)
To end Spam, you must "de-monetize" it.
To do this you must increase the bandwidth loading of the spammer's sponsor (the 'business' paying to have the spam sent) beyond tollerable levels. The only way to do this is with a distributed "insincere curosity attack".
To do this you must write a mail app plug-in that allows you to drop spam into an analyser bucket on your desktop. This analyser would parse the spam for URLs and toll free numbers in the body of the spam. This analyser then routes these "targets" out on to a peer to peer, gnutella style network. As soon as each peer in the network gets about, say, 20 or so copies of that same target submitted from other peers, then a small HTTP client would start making random requests to the target URL or toll free number. This would keep up until the target disapears.
Oh, and to play the Flute, you just blow across the little hole on the one end while moving your fingers back and forth on the outside of the tube.
only bad can come of this (Score:3, Insightful)
Charging this way for e-mail will do nothing at all positive to stop spam, it will in fact have just the opposite effect.
The big time spammers are tightly in league with their service providers, this "postage" cost will not be a real cost for them at all, but it will have major impacts on any legitimate use of e-mail. Shoestring organizations that link hundreds or a few thousand worldwide members with useful, informative e-mail messages will be put out of action cold. New business models that automatically e-mail you important information that you want (such as confirmation of delivery, or news or sports information) will have to rethink their options and either cut back such inovative services or charge additional for it. Even individuals will be less likely to send quick acknowledgments when they know the will eventually be bled dry by snowballing small charges.
Meanwhile, the spammers who don't really pay these charges at all (either because they are in league with their ISP, they are their own ISP and so pay themselves, or they are using a temporary account, viouating it's terms of service, and intend to abandon it and pay nothing) will claim that because of this bogus e-mail postage charge they somehow have a paid for right to overflow your in-box to the point that you can't get legitimate e-mail and waste even more of your time sorting through their deceptive crap so that you don't happen to miss that rare but important legitimate message.
Given that this lame idea will not prevent any spam, and will certainly have negative impacts on legit users, it should not at all be encouraged as "anything as long as it might fight spam" or "I'd love to see something done." but rather but rather be actively discouraged as the bad idea that it is.
Too much hassle for email recipient (Score:3, Interesting)
You sign up on a website that sends you an activation code for your account there. The site you signed up on is a small business that can't afford to pay to get this email through to you. So either you have to remember to add their email address to your free whitelist, or you don't receive the email (and many users wouldn't have any clue why). The small business thus gets so much less business that they go under.
The same goes for subscribing to an eZine or mail lists (can you imagine how many bounces bugtraq would have to deal with?), receiving any other email from a site where you sign up, etc. And every time a friend changed their email address or you met someone new, you'd have to update your whitelist.
This kind of system would be useless for an email address where you accepted bug reports for products, etc. (any address that you would HAVE to keep open for free).
I guess if there are people who would want to use such a system, then I'm all for someone creating it. But I won't be using it, and I can't see myself paying to get my emails through.
TMDA (Score:4, Insightful)
Asking for some kind of money (even for charity) for sending mail to something will stop a lot of people of sending email, even mail that you would want to receive. Suppose that I want to mail someone with this system because he have a worm, or an open relay, warn him about something or whatever that he wants to know. If I have to pay to do a favor to someone, well, I will forget about it. Worst than this, suppose that the author of this paper use the system, and I want to warn him of a problem there, well, in this case the problem will happen in the worst moment possible, but I will not warn him.
I still prefer the hashcash solution. (Score:3, Interesting)
It has several advantages that pay solutions don't.
It doesn't require a micropayment solution
It doesn't require a central registry
An additional benefit is that for small senders the cost remains negligibly small -- perhaps 2 seconds per e-mail address sent to. For spammers 2 seconds per e-mail address is a huge burden. If you're trying to mail to 10 million addresses, you need 231 hours of processor time to compute the hashcash "stamp" required for all the address. It's not an impossible feat, but if a spammer needs to set up server farms just to compute stamps their profit margins shrink signifigantly.
Group working on an implementation of hashcash [camram.org]
Spam Killers Not Enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
What am I missing?
Re:Spam Killers Not Enough? (Score:4, Informative)
What am I missing?
Bandwidth.
If you're filtering 100 messages per day, those messages are still making it all the way from the spammer's system to your mail server (or even your computer itself, depending on the type of filtering you use.) If each of the 1000 people who use your (relatively small) ISP get 100 messages a day, that's 100,000 pieces of spam a day. Seeing as a lot of spam now comes in easy-to-digest 48k and 123k attachment crapbombs, you're talking massive amounts--gigabytes and gigabytes--of spam that gets sent over your ISP's lines every day.
Filtering is, in many ways, a catalyst in the "spam eats up bandwidth" equation. Since you never need to deal with the mail, you're not nearly as likely to get up in arms about the mass of crap flowing over your network. You'll still pay for it though, in the form of higher access charges, slower server response, and less money at your ISP to go towards support or more useful tasks.
The Internet Powers That Be don't care one whit about the time people lose sifting through their junk mail--that's Somebody Else's Problem. By that point, the damage is done.
IBM researcher is TOO LATE (Score:3, Funny)
The US Postal Service is already PLANNING TO DO THIS. [snopes.com] This must be stopped at all costs! Please forward to all your friends! URGENT!
</sarcasm>
RTFA!!! (Score:5, Informative)
The law would never pass : That's one of the best feature in this idea. No need for a new law. The recipient already has the right to block incoming messages. You know, when your phone rings, you won't go to jail if you don't take the call.
Spammers will never accept this : Of course not, but nobody asks them! Using this kind of solution is YOUR decision; you don't have to ask anybody's permission, especially spammers.
Widespread adoption will never occur : So what? This system will work for me even if I'm the only user. It's not one of those things that require a critical mass of users to be useful.
This will not completely eradicate spam : Frankly, I don't care. If it prevents spam sent to me, it's good enough.
5 cents to read spam is not worth it : You're missing the point. This is not about making money, it's about discouraging spammers. No spammer will ever send you an email if it costs him 5 cents. And the price is not for making you actually read the spam, it's only for allowing it to reach your inbox. In the very unlikely case a spammer actually pays, just delete the message as usual.
So please, read the article. The idea may not be completely new (email stamp) but the details address most obvious objections.
One problem I can think of is still pending : what happens if the sender is also equiped with a similar system? Will we see payment notices bouncing back and forth between both ends without ever reaching an inbox? I guess a solution would be to automatically whitelist any address you've sent an email to, if only for 1 hour.
Now, the really funny part is that ALL of the above (including subject line) is the exact post I submitted on Dec 10, in reply to an article about the same research by the same researcher.
We're discovering the notion of meta-dupe: it's a dupe slashdot story with dupe replies. By the way, my original post was modded +5 informative. If this one gets modded +5 too, we will achieve uber-meta-dupe status: the exact same story, with the exact same comment, with the exact same moderation. Perpetual motion, sorta...
It might work out. (Score:3, Interesting)
This would certainly wipe out the low end of the spam world; webcams, anatomical enlargements, etc. If some decent sized corporation wants to send me mail, that's fine.
The problem comes in through identity checking. How do you know the person who is sending you mail is on the list? I'm sure everyone here knows how to send email from a port 25 hack; even if you don't, it's completely obvious that spammers know how to forge whatever name they want.
So, in order for this to work, digital signatures would have to become much more common. Which I don't see happening any time soon. (vis a vis, if you only accepted digitally signed email, there would be no spam.)
Blah blah. I'll just stick with my filtering.
Just my 0.113620 Egyptian pounds's worth.
SPAM is the price of email. (Score:3, Funny)
The stupidest thing ever (Score:3)
The first time someone emails you, have them look at a picture of words, or even just have them reply to a validation email. (or allow them to reply if you email them, otherwise this system would never work
Any solution that requires other people to change their software to email you is not going to work. And I'm certainly not going to pay any money to email someone. A few people might, but the vast majority won't. This system would do far worse with false positives then any filter. And it wouldn't do any better at all then requiring a simple digital signatures anyway!
By the way, one interesting thing about this technology, If it became widespread, it would change society a little. People would solicit email from people to get the cash. If you charged 5, and got 1k emails a day, that would be $50/day or $18,000/year. I could so see people running popular websites asking people to email them to support the site, rather then (or in addition to) advertisements or conventional donations.
Re:The stupidest thing ever (Score:3)
The system doesn't require other people to change their software to email you. They simply have to provide a token (that they purchase from
something doesn't sound right (Score:4, Insightful)
But I still don't think that this is a great idea. That's my hunch. Email wasn't designed to pay for it under any circumstance including, what you know today, spam. Once any email becomes non-free, free as free beer, it really changes the way in which email is used today. Sounds like a good idea to me generally, but
Re:something doesn't sound right (Score:3, Insightful)
The main problems are in collection and identification. The RECIPIENT is expected to maintain a whitelist of "good email" addresses. So, then I am expected to enter the the address book for my entire company, including their personal address? New addresses from friends on the road using a throwaway yahoo address?
Not to mention the administration aspects for ISPs. Or how anyone could enforce this on the world. Spam works because it can be sent by the bazillion; good addresses or bad addresses. It
Re:something doesn't sound right (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad to impliment perhaps, but not impossible.
I already implement something very similar with spamwolf.
I could probably hack out an implementation in a week if I wanted to.
It's easy enough for the recipient to maintain a white list if it doesn't have to be complete,
and your f
Re:something doesn't sound right (Score:3)
I agree, not a good idea.
Re:Collective spam filter (Score:2)
The RBLs were an initial attempt to do so, but only prove about 60% accurate these days (at least from what I see - I've given up on the idea now).
Then you've got Razor2 and Pyzor, and the DCC to be investigating.
After you
Re:Funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot Slippery Slope Alert (Score:2)