Slashdot Mirror
One Answer To Spam: Sell Your Interruption Time
An anonymous reader writes "A recent article in the IBM Systems Journal describes an innovative solution to curb both spam email and telemarketing. In short, the potential recipient of a message/call advertises the potential cost of contacting him uninvited. If the sender agrees to pay that cost, it acquires a token that it includes in the message/call and the message/call is accepted. The recipient decides to collect the fee or not, while recipients in a white list are not required to carry a token. The author also provides for a more detailed description."
I just don't see how this could work. There appear to be too many technical issues involved, not least of which is implementation. First of all, you have to assume there will some "e-token standard." Next, you have to assume Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and all the other free-email services will support it. You can do a proxy server on the clients for other mail packages, but anything web-based will have to be adapted to it.
Next you need to somehow distribute the tokens to these different systems. This seems to require some sort of integration between the token provider(s) and the e-mail systems and web-based e-mail services.
I just don't see it happening to fix something that can be handled pretty well through filtering. The fact is, e-mail filtering software is making great headway these days. Baysian filters, collective filters like Cloudmark's SpamNet, and so forth.
One idea I had was for a white-list proxy. The first time someone sent you an e-mail, it would hold it in a queue. It would send them back a message asking them if they're sure they want to deliver the message (99% of spammers won't get past this point). As the recipient, you would would be notified of their intent to e-mail you and then validate whether or not you wanted to allow mail from this new sender in the future.
It has problems as well, but it's infinitely more implementable than the idea this paper proposes.