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One Answer To Spam: Sell Your Interruption Time

Posted by timothy on from the here-are-my-rates dept.

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."

2 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Large problem with this: Unexpected relevant calls by chuckfirment · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The article talks about using "Interrupt Tokens" that you can give out as a one-use token to interrupt (email spam, telemarketer call) you. If the person contacting you doesn't have an interrupt token, they can't contact you without paying your "Interrupt Fee", the fee that you set for contacting you.

    I often get calls that I don't expect, and I need to take them. I can't have people unable to contact me about a business deal because they don't want to pay my "Interrupt Fee". They'll say, "Eh, to heck with it. I'll give the deal to the next guy down the line."

    For telemarketers, I use the key phrase, "Place me on your do not call list." I get maybe one telemarketer call every other month, and normally those are recorded messages.

    Chuck Firment

  2. Simple solution: Require PGP/GPG sig/encryption by Jens · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I've been doing this for some time. It works like this:

    • You have a whitelist of domains and adresses.
    • You also have a blacklist of domains and addresses.
    • Every mail from a sender in the whitelist is accepted.
    • Every PGP/GPG-signed or encrypted mail from a sender NOT in the blacklist is also accepted.
    • Everyone else will get a mail back and have to click on an URL (or reply to the confirmation mail) confirming his/her message to me.
    • Double bounced addresses land in the blacklist.
    Bang, zero spam.

    Remember to put your business partners on the whitelist though. ;)

    -- Jens

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