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Spam Under Legislative Attack in Europe
Anonymous Coward writes: "CNN has an article in their Science and Technology section detailing how the European telecommunication ministers have agreed that unsolicited e-mail and wireless text messages should be prohibited under a new data protection law. They also are agreeing to allow leeway for law enforcement to access logs of e-mail and telephone traffic.
If I could set up my email system in such a way that it will only receive email after receiving notification from paypal that an amount X has been transferred to me, I would cease to receive spam overnight. My personal threshold would be 25 cents - less than a stamp but enough to be noticed. This would deter spammers, but not keep entities with a reasonable expectiation that I want the mail from emailing me. It might even deter those pesky friends that keep sending me copies of jokes that were already old when I was still young.
Between friends engaging in conversation, the amounts paid would balance out. But in the case of one way communication, I'd get paid a bit for the time I spend looking at my emails.
Obviously, this can be implemented with reasonable effort pretty quickly. There are some minor details to deal with, nothing traumatic though: The sender would have to be able to determine what the going receiving rate of the recipient is. There needs to be a functional and pervasive micropayment system (paypal). Mail programs would need to be updated to deal with the added protocols.
I find it amusing how politicians still think they can regulate the Internet by way of stroke of pen. They'll have to learn the hard way. Sadly, we'll have to suffer in the meantime.
Interesting idea, but doubtful to work with the current system in any way. (You really want to have to declare all of those micropayments on your 1040?)
Personally, I think some kind of pre-authorization scheme is better than a pay system - remember, this has to work in third world countries, too.
Brad Templeton has a neat system in place that is not too difficult to use at all. If you send him an email, you get the following:
OK - there goes 99% of your spam.
If spammers figure a way to reply, add a question and answer feature:
You could make the questions progressively tougher
Procmail could handle the rest of the mail, too, (if it weren't so damn hard to write recipes for. Yes, I know about the perl mail filters - I'm looking into them now.)
Imagine a procmail-type system that could strip attatchments and process them:
Since I get a lot of mail in Japanese, I could choose to detect DBCS text and run it through babelfish before I read it.
Most of these things could be and are being done. I bet there would be a market for a prewritten package customizable through a web interface. I would buy it.
What you do with incoming mail is a very personal decision - some people *like* mails that you and I would consider spam. There are always exceptions to the rules:
What happens when your mail filter blindly drops a mail from your wife telling that the baby just ate the Copier Toner or your housemate writes to tell you that a group of Real Naked Coeds are waiting in your room - get home quick! OK, neither of those situations are likely to occur, but you get the idea...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Mail clients should have a spam-vote button, a button that lets you vote for blacklisting the sender of the message you are just viewing.
If you press the button you get a warning, explaining what you're about to do. If you accept, a message including all the headers of the spam mail is created automatically and sent to a spam-vote server at your e-mail service provider. This vote server verifies that the vote comes from you, and then, possibly after some processing, sends your vote to one or more blacklisting services chosen by your e-mail service provider.
If there are just a few votes to blacklist a particular sender it's considered a mistake and no blacklisting occurs. The sender is blacklisted only if the number of votes is large. If a provider has a very large number of blacklisted senders, that provider may be blacklisted.
This would give technically clueless users a say in the matter. It would let clueless users send proper spam complaints, complete with all the headers. And it would allow people to stem the flood without revealing their e-mail address to fake opt-out lists that just increase the spamming.
When you press the spam-vote button, the mail client not only sends the spam vote. It also puts the sender in the client's own list of blocked senders, and removes all the messages that came from that sender. You can change your mind and remove the blocking, so you can receive messages from that sender again. Then the mail client creates another automatic message revoking the blacklist vote.
This way even the clueless will see what happens. A clueless user can't just keep sending a lot of blacklisting votes by mistake. Mistakes have consequences that have to be rectified.
At the server side, the system can be refined and improved over time. For instance, the voting services should count percentages rather than absolute numbers. They might also keep karma points and reputation scores. They might use collaborative filtering. Lots of different refinements are possible. Hopefully there would be several different services trying different strategies so the system evolves.
Users can then try different e-mail service providers with different spam-vote and spam-block policies. Probably many providers would let users choose among several alternatives. Tastes differ very much in this matter. You try different alternatives and see what works best for you.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. Unfortunately, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.