Slashdot Mirror
Penny Black Project Investigates Sender-Pays E-mail
Anonymous Coward writes "The Inquirer reports: Microsoft contemplating charging for emails. 'MICROSOFT IS UNFOLDING something it calls the Penny Black project in which people sending emails might have to pay for the privilege.' Microsoft's explanation of the project is here: The Penny Black Project." There are a lot of things going on at Microsoft Research -- no guarantee that particular ones are going to be released in the real world. (And Microsoft isn't the only party interested in sender-pays, or at least sender-risks-paying systems.)
I'd have enough to buy a new car!
This is an anti-spam tool that doesn't need to be paid in cash. This also presents /. with an interesting juggling act: we hate Microsoft, but we also hate spam.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
I think my desire to see the 1998-99 internet doubles every time I see a story like this.
It is rapidly being forgotten that things being free was one of the reasons why this internet thingy took off in the first place.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
This could be a good thing, after all, if spammers had to pay for all that mail they send, they would have problems sending millions a day.
On the other hand, I don't want to pay for email, I already get it for free. I think that this idea would be great if it could somehow charge spammers for emailing me, while letting me send out whatever i want.
Email is already free, I don't see a way for any company to charge for it, but I am all for using any tool to stop spam as long as it doesn't hurt me.
The easiest way to deter spam is to charge per byte rather than a flat monthly fee. Of course this has the (sometimes) undesirable side effect of increasing the cost of downloaded/pirated goods...
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
from the article:
The Penny Black project is investigating several techniques to reduce spam by making the sender pay.
Well sorry, but I get a pile of junk mail every week on my doormat through my post and in my papers - and the senders have had to pay both to print AND send that...
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
You didn't get the joke? Black people don't pronounce r's.
This whole thing is really just a way to deal with the fact that SMTP doesn't do any real authentication of ANYTHING when it receives a message. Developing a whole side protocol to run along-side SMTP and "verify" that a message is sent by a human or creating some micro-payment scheme really seems like a waste - getting it widely adopted would be at least as hard as getting a replacement protocol for SMTP adopted - so why not focus on that?
An SMTP replacement that verified - at least - that the domain of the sender was correct - would cut down on spam tremendously. Virually all spam I get has forged headers and invalid reply addresses.
... but I still don't trust Microsoft.
I think the solution to spam should be an open, non-proprietary solution, which means it will likely be open-source or IEEE/W3C approved.
AC comments get piped to
Hmmm. Is it now time to download an iso & write a couple of configuration files? At 1232 printed pages, sendmail is starting looking like a good candidate to keep some of my other books about fighting the good fight company.
The article does not mention how microsoft could roll this out. Admittedly the ticket system would be better than changing the SMTP protocol, since it could be added on top of SMTP. But we would still need an incentive for people to start buying the tickets before people can block ticketless senders. In addition there is the problem of legitimate automated emails. Will whitelisting be effective enough to allow these through? What about bounce notices? etc..
The slashdot heading is misleading; these guys are trying to make a system that will make it more expensive for mass emailers to send out spam. Not necessarily through money (although that is an option) but through exchange of resources, like cpu cycles. Very novel concept. I can imagine the same being done all over the internet. Instead of paying by cash you pay with something you have in abunadance (definately not cash) ... cpu cycles.
Suppose slashdot wants to make revenue: every user that hits the slashdot page agrees to donate some of their cpu resources to slashdot. slashdot inturn sells these resource for cash to GENOME xyz company which uses distributed computing to fold DNA sequences.
Most people who spam setup their own mail servers. Hell, many spammers aren't even in the US. How is charging people to send E-Mail going to solve the spam problem?
.
Sure, M$ could meter activity on port 25, but to send E-Mail SMTP can be running on any old port as far as I know .
This is just dumb . . .
my bad
AC comments get piped to
Are they going to start doing a subscription service for Windows Update? Make you pay so if you want to apply patches the easy way(In IE I presume)?
So, the plan is to make the hundreds of millions (if not +1 billion) individuals who properly use email for individual communication in order to stop or slow down the few tens or hundreds of professional SPAMers from the expense of mass emailings. Why do I think this benefits the toll colector more than me? Why can't international and nationa legislation solve this problem?
I would argue that the real solution to SPAM is to fix SMTP such that it authenticates users and servers at the protocol level while mail is passed from the originating server to the final destination. But of course, there's no need to charge a per-email fee in such a circumstance. And while I'm not surprised to see Microsoft devoting R&D dollars toward such a scheme, given todays 'charge for it and make it fit into an economic model or it doesn't exist' guilded age we should expect MS is only one of many to try and find a way to extract more money for the things we take for granted as free today. Would anyone like to buy some of my bottled air?
--Maynard
We're considering several currencies for payment: CPU cycles, memory cycles...
Yet another ploy to backdoor access my computer. Any bets on support for alternate OSs?
Imagine what a dilemma this story would have been for the /. editors! While on the one hand wanting to trumpet "Yay! The end of spam!!", the other half wanted to write "No!! M$ is up to its dirty tricks again to demolish your last bit of freedom!!!". Note the uncertain, uncomfortable tone of timothy's comment: "There are a lot of things going on at Microsoft Research -- no guarantee that particular ones are going to be released in the real world." ;^)
The Post Office also goes after fraud in a big way. So mailed advertisements are significantly more trustworthy than the common enlarge your penis/breasts emails.
Everyone knocks the post office, but for $0.37, would you deliver a letter anywhere in the US?
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Black people don't pronounce r's
Nice try, but no. The "black" dialects have the same rules for dropping 'r' that British RP or any other non-rhotic English dialect uses. Non-rhotic English drops 'r' only after a vowel sound. Thus, 'r' would not be dropped in the word "project".
Will I retire or break 10K?
I wouldn't mind paying a penny or two to send email if a couple bucks were shaved off of my ISP's bill each month. As far as I'm concerned, I already pay for the email: it's in my monthly internet bill.
But if they release a plan that says, "You're internet bill will go down by $5, but you'll have to pay $0.02 per email", I wouldn't mind that.
I'm sure MSFT shouldn't be in charge of this, there should be a gov't mandate to ISPs, and international treaties to cover the world, ensuring that a server in Kazahkstan doesn't just fill the gap. We have to change the economics, becaues complete filtering is impossible, and email is becoming tiresome from spam. Why should you have to hide your email address in communications? Death to Spammers.
Spam is a symptom, not a disease. Strike down all industries that pay spammers to advertise. My preffered method would be to reply to every spam I get, at exactly 1:00 PM EST, regulated to an atomic clock, and reload several times.
If everybody did this, or a script could be set up to do the job, companies would see that spam would result in large costs for bandwidth, damages to servers, etc. When companies stop paying spammers, the spammers will wither away and vanish all by themselves.
Or I'd like to see an option on my email where I could pay a dollar myself to sic a smart bomb on the advertising company. Or at least pay a dollar to buy out and chapter 11 the company away. I'd pay a dollar a day to eradicate spam, myself.
Here is an idea, it is borrowed from the way ISP's pay for bandwith.
Why not make networks pay for the e-mail that originates there? Subtract the e-mail that arrives. For most companies/networks - that will be just about an break even proposition. For the ones who allow spammers - well... that is going to get expensive pretty quickly. Sooo... they will either boot the spammers off, or get them to pay it. Either way, we win!
They would start by giving Hotmail users real spam filtering, instead of a limit of 250 blocked addresses. It's incredibly easy for spammers to cycle through that many addresses-- especially if you have more than one spammer throwing that sh*t at you.
One day this week, I had 20 new emails when I logged into Hotmail, and they were all spam. This is a little more than usual, but this is a dormant account, folks! I am considering abandoning my Hotmail account because of this sorry situation. Other email accounts I have use more effective spam fighting measures, and I have the ability to filter it in Evolution, thank goodness. I have a hard time believing that the 'penny black' scheme would be much of a solution-- I think we're talking about legislating fines, a la telemarketers. We already pay our ISPs for the privilege of email and other services, and I presume spammers are paying for the bandwidth they're using, too. If MS wants to impose this upon its own Internet customers, more power to them if they're really spammers, but I don't think they should be in charge of this issue for the Internet.
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
What about sites that run mailing lists? What about forums that have "email me when someone replies to this topic"? What about sites that use email as a way of sending username/password to new subscribers?
This will hurt these sites (that are often run out of the webmaster's pocket with no profit turned)
Before you get to the 'all our ca$h are belong to M$FT' portion of your rants, read the article. Money is only one of the considered options and not even the most prominent of the outline. They have a linked write-up of the CPU cycle based system whereas the sender is required to compute a function that could take 10/30/60 seconds. Also, the folks involved aren't any slouches - check their biographies/resumes (although I have to admit Birrell's looks like a high schools student's resume towards the end).
I used to live in the Pojects.
incripshin
Changing SMTP means switching over every SMTP server and relay.. that's a lot of work and there's a lot of financial resistance to that.
On the other hand this micropayment system can be implemented on TOP Of SMTP... using a server that issues digitally signed tickets, which can simply be appended as an attachment to the emails.
Certainly this system will meet some resistance as well, but much much less. It will only require the clients to change what they are using, not the servers. However in the long term we could probably consider a replacement for SMTP... for example we could roll out the client code together with the client code for this Penny Black system. Then, if this system gets wide spread then people can deploy replacement-for-SMTP servers confident that clients will be able to use them
And how do you flag a post saying its already being paif for? Itll only be a matter of time someone cracks the encoding for the 'already paid for' data and totally reduces the whole system to a mess.
Let's say the guys over at Penny Arcade want to send a gif out to all their loyal fans. Let's say their mailing list was 5,000 people long. It's gonna cost them $50! And if you charge per MB, it'll probably cost even more. Spam, like piracy, needs to be fought with a technical solution. These penny-a-mail type hacks just end up hurting the little guy.
c-hack.com |
its about $50 a month. fortunately it also includes the rest of my access.
every mail over 100 per day through a server outside of the inteernal network (you know to the internet) would cost 1 cent a peice.
IE you could send 1000 internal e-mails over your own network and pay nothing.
You send 1000 e-mails to people "outside" of your inernal network in a day you pay 900 cents, or for those of you with math mad skillz thats 9 bucks.
So a spammer trying not to pay a lot of money would have to send only 100 e-mails a day for free.
if he sent 5000000 e-mails in a day thats 5000000-100, 4999900 pennys, or for those of you in the math "know" its 49,999 dollars.
Now im sure that if a spammer were to have to pay 49999 dollars to send E-MAIL, their business would become less than profitable.
Most users dont send 100 e-mails a day, even when i was getting 70 e-mails a day i didnt reply to all 70.
auto responce mails could be ignored.
large companies might get a "bulk" rate on e-mail, or move there services to online methods of checking (IE they dont have to flood mail servers with 'gamespy announces it got cooler') kind of e-mails.
anyway the idea has some merits, though even now I can tink of a great many problems with it.
anyway just a little teaser idea.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
If there were a method in existence to easily track and identify the sender of SPAM email, we could easily enforce anti-spam laws and the sender-pay idea would be rendered moot (that is if stopping spam was the true reason behind Microsoft's decisions).
Unlikely.
Russ Jones
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wonder if some kind of exponential backoff system like that used with some password verifiers would be some kind of a solution?
It may not be that good for people who want to send mail to lots of people (mailing lists etc.), but for public servers that need to remain open to relay (for some reason?!) I would say the majority of people connect, send one or two emails, then disconnect. This would mean the user sending one mail, then waiting a couple of seconds, then being able to send the next. However, if the user were sending 200 emails, like a spammer may be doing, the time scales involved between each mail would become exponentially larger, and would greatly reduce the speed at which spammers can send out mail. (i.e. by their 30th mail, they may be waiting hours before being able to send their next one).
Obviously if the spammer has access to lots of IP addresses, they could fool the server into thinking they are lots of different hosts, but nonetheless, I find it an interesting idea which may have, at least a minimal application in reducing spam.
...that this will be limited to spammers, guess again. Once MS figures out how to charge anyone for sending anything, they will patent it, make it a standard, and implement it in every product they sell. And with their still overewhelming monopoly, this will go Charlie Foxtrot in record time.
.net, IE, access, passport, the most vulnerable servers ever devised, and that christless butterfly.
And by the way, my incoming spam cost me only aggravation, and I'd rather tweak my mail.app settings than to pay someone by the message. By 'recipient' they must be referring to people running their servers and having to filter this stuff. Boo-fricking-hoo. Solve your mail server problems and do it in the ost resilient monetary fashion.
Maybe they're lining up behind the gummint under the apparently delectable idea that we can trample everyone's rights and assumptions to make life a little easier for people who aren't doing their job in the first place.
This is the electronic equivalent of plastic sheets and duct tape.
"We're from Miscrosoft. We're here to help."
Yes, I know it's only research, and it may never see the light of day, but then explain the rest of the half baked MS implementations that have been sanctified, dogma-fied, shoved down our throats and caused us to question our sanity - directx,
I gotta go.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
RTFA, this isn't about charging for email use. This is about making people ACCOUNTABLE for excessive email abuse (i.e. spam). Just one of the options being considered is charging money for it, also considered are cpu cycles, etc.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
I install a copy of sendmail on my computer and use it to spam a hundred thousand people.
Who charges me? Mail is just TCP/IP traffic.
Visit the
>> Well sorry, but I get a pile of junk mail every week on my doormat through my post and in my papers - and the senders have had to pay both to print AND send that...
/. for many Joe-Job stories), and I am 100% for this project. Of course I would prefer Microsoft not be in control of the process.
:)
-----------------
And each Junk Mail cost 5-15 cents to get at your door. Now imagine it would cost 10$ for 50 million distribution; how big of a mailbox would you need?
I also like the argument 'It supports the US postal service' not to mention jobs for printers, marketing, graphics, artists, photographs, etc...
Spam does not create a lot of jobs. I bet it costs more time (a few minutes from millions of people every day usually at work) than it gives 'job time' to spammers and their clients (sellers) so hurts the economy instead of a benefice.
I am currently the victim of a Joe-Job (See Wednesday
As long as the victime of the Joe-Job dont end up paying of course
According to a Nov. 21, 2002 Seattle Times article:
So now it becomes clear why the Bush administration has gone easy on Microsoft -- it planned to become its business partner.If we could somehow decide what "type" of email one has to pay for because no one wants it, wouldn't it be just as easy to stop it from occuring in the first place?
By making people pay, even a very small amount, would be irritating and completely unneccerasy if the sole purpose was to defeat spam.
Don't you just love the way they trick into thinking this is great news by putting "MICROSOFT IS UNFOLDING" all in caps?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Leave it for Billy Boy to come up with an insane cockamaney idea like that.... but if it will get rid of spam.... it might just fly.
Of course Microsoft will use this as a way to get some $ out of every M$ email user. Until people switch and find some other free way to send email. I doubt it will end spam, but it may drive people away from using M$ tools.
So if you send an email, you have to put a penny on the line. If it gets through, and the person on the other end doesn't think it's spam, then you get your penny back.
This is an interesting idea.. I just don't see how its any better than forced verification of the originating addresses on an incoming email, though.
I mean, I can see how this could get expensive for the type of people who forward around those annoying chain emails, or jokes or what have you. Undoubtedly, they'd cut it out after realizing that people aren't reimbursing them for their email. But for the spammers at large..
See, the thing is, you're putting the responsibility for this back on the users. If I get an email, I'm either going to have to manually reimburse them, or manually not reimburse them. The onus is still on the end user.
Sure, they might be investigating Turing-test checks for spam, and the like, and yes, there is Bayesian filtering now too. But this is all still going to have to be there to automate the process, even with this transaction system.
I would've hoped that, by now, we'd be looking at ways to move this onto the system, in the form of proper verification or something, so we the users don't have to deal with it as much. (To those of you talking about having to upgrade all of our infastructure to handle verification, should the protocol change, what makes you think we wouldn't have to if a transaction pay-per-email system comes into place?)
The other problem I see is that these spammers might just not care about the cost. I mean, c'mon, a penny an email? That's still cheaper than a snail-mail ad.
..bitching about e-mail being free for years.
Ah well. Farewell, e-mail. I go now to send messages through other means.
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
Just a thought. Many companies send e-mails to a large list of users (I receive them from Nasa News and NY Times, for instance). If they were charged, either in in CPU cycles or real money, maybe they would have to stop those services, or making them paid. I don't mind paying for services if they are useful to me, but what about mailing lists and related services?
One doubt I have is whether this would affect the spammers who use randomly generated accounts in hotmail and other sites. The CPU cycles would be theirs or hotmail's? If there was a limit of e-mails an account could send, like someone suggested, couldn't they just generate more accounts and still send e-mails for free?
A former Microsoft Corp. manager who was facing prosecution for allegedly stealing more than $9 million worth of software died unexpectedly at a local hospital four days ago, the King Country Medical Examiner's office said on Tuesday.
Daniel Feussner, 32, died last Friday due to multiple organ failure, but the cause of death could not be determined until further tests were conducted, an investigator at the Medical Examiner's office said.
Officials for Overlake Hospital Medical Center in Bellevue, Washington, did not confirm whether Feussner was a patient there, citing the hospital's privacy policy.
Feussner was out on bail after being fired and arrested in December for allegedly obtaining software meant for internal use and selling it illegally to fund a lavish lifestyle of luxury cars, jewelry and a yacht.
"We are very saddened by this tragic event and our hearts are with Daniels' family and friends," said Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake.
You are creditted your (credit) back if the other person responds to the ORIGIN. This would once and for all stop fake sendmail logs. Although, ISPs should be resolving these anyway and not allowing them through.
Replies do not get charged for, all forwards are charged for, no matter what the content.
Hackers or abusers of the policy are warned once, fined HEAVILY second offense, loose business liscense 3rd offense.
All solicitations are required to be labelled as such, if not labelled, 10 reports, get's a warning, 10 more a HEAVY fine. All sender's of email are allowed ONE account per IP.
Unfair to legit advertisers? No, they can go back to website ads and banner ads. Unfair to campaign constiuents? No, they should have to pay for media as they do other outlets.
I think this would require modified email clients.
Feel free to add to restrictions and comments.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Paying for postage never stoped or even slowed down the senders of junk mail. Paying for email won't slow down spamers. It's just too lucrative!
with MS Penny Blacks? Or do they appreciate as much in value if you hang onto them long enough?
Otherwise I'm not sure I'm interested.
KFG
And cash. I don't like that. I don't like Microsoft. Lets make Microsoft pay or every email.
IMAP is your friend. Bring in headers. Filter on that. Bring in bodies of what's left, Filter on that. What's left is what you want.
The end-user will be in charge of debiting the sender. If a stranger sender is told that he must pay, but will be credited if it's not SPAM, the SPAM problem is solved. Rich spammers can spam me all they want for ten dollars a piece.
Join the IM2000 mailing list.
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
Seriously, I think this is a really nice plan. Sort of like a deposit program. Yes there will be abuses, but the fact is that it is a reasonable start and does NOT cost money.
The problem I have with paying to send an email is that it is yet another cost to add to your monthly bill.
People like to pay for things in all or nothing mode. Why do you think people get cell phones that say you can call for X minutes for free. Pay cable and you get X channels, etc.
When you are nickeled and dimed to death people become conservative when they should not. Witness in Europe the changing Internet usage when people switch to DSL or Cable.
But back to the point, REALLY nice idea....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I kinda like it but with a twist, everyone pays to e-mail. however on the other
end the receptiving party has the choice of bouncing the the message if it
offends them. If an e-mail isn't bounced the sender's account is credited in
full the fee payed. However if the e-mail is bounced then the sender looses there payment.
This could also help in finacing the system and probably should be managed by a non-profit
origination to keep it honest. It wouldn't be perfect and there are some issues
such and time limits but could be workable.
...who says this very idea is being tossed around in Cupertino - the combination of a pay-to-play Mail.app and a beefed up .Mac (with iLife deeply embedded and integrated to the .Mac servers) could really bring in some much-needed revenue for Apple. They're supposedly contemplating going to a subscription model for most of their i-stuff as well, but he's not sure how this would work...
;-)
AC for obvious reasons
How you say when a mailing list (a message that goes to a lot of mail addresses) is a "normal" mailing list or spam?
.NET installed), this could be more harmful. How you detect an spammer that don't have this kind of software/control installed from, say, someone with a normal mail server, that don't send spam but for any reason don't "upgrade" (if this is possible) the mail server?
If you force the remote machine to do a calculation, pay something or pass a turing test most mailing lists will disappear. If its implemented in some server (lets suppose Hotmail to fix ideas) then all users there that want to join mailing lists wich administrators don't want to afford whatever measure of this kind, well, would have to leave hotmail or open a mailing list account somewhere else.
Using white list could be a solution, but this also could limit the freedom of having your own mailing/distribution list.
And speaking of this, if you server is not ready to pass the MS test (i.e. it requires
People are focusing a lot on the idea of paying real dollars in order to send e-mail. The thrust of the research in this article appears to be for alternative "currency" models.
So for CPU cycles, here's what I think they are doing:
Every email account has a notion of a "ticket pool". A valid ticket is very expensive to create. Say, it takes 5 minutes to make one on a fast modern machine, at 100% CPU.
When I send an email, a ticket is attached to it. This ticket is required for sending mail (say, through the Hotmail SMTP servers, for example). No ticket, it bounces back to me. When I get a reply to the mail, or perhaps some other sort of acknowledgement from the receiver that they meant to receive the mail, I get credit back for the ticket I used.
In normal circumstances, you almost never have to create new tickets. If you have 10 in your pool, and you are mostly emailing co-workers and friends, you never run out of tickets, and everything acts just like it does today.
However, if you are a spammer, and you want to send 1,000,000 emails per day to people who don't really want to get them, and are never going to reply to your email address (which, to make things worse, probably changes with every batch you send out, to keep yourself anonymous), it's too "expensive" to stay in the spam business. To send 1M unsolicited emails could cost up to 1M tickets, which you may never get credit back for. To generate those would cost 5M minutes on the client machine, which would mean 9.5 years of number crunching, to send one day's worth of email. Clearly not feasible.
Let's say we cut the time per ticket from 5 minutes to 5 seconds. Now, it's almost unnoticeable for normail email usage. An extra 5 seconds to send a mail? Totally not a big deal unless you are mass mailing. But again, to send 1M mails per day, even 5 seconds per mail costs 57.8 *days* worth of CPU crunching. Also completely not feasible.
Sounds like a great plan to me, once all the details I'm glossing over are worked out, but that's what research is for!
The only issue here, that Timothy hit on in a follow-up comment, is that there'd have to be mechanisms for valid mass-email to be sent out. Banks sending statements, Organizations sending email-newsletters, etc. Perhaps there'd be a way to give them a pool with a million tickets, and rely on whatever mechanism was used by the receiver to credit them back after the newsletter was read/received..something like that.
(Ah, the devil is in the details...)
Tricky project to get right, but it could definitely be a win/win.
It seems the only truely effective way to prevent SPAM is to charge for it. So far every technological SPAM blocking technique has failed to completely protect against it. It's just a matter of time before spammers find a way around any new technological solutions possible.
There was once a project called "Flying Rat" which let you block all incoming email unless it contained a small e-gold payment. It was actually deployed, I once sent "stamped" email to Lance Cottrell.
It seems to have vanished, the most recent references I could find were a couple of years old.
If you want to research it I recommend searching with e-gold as a keyword.
We are talking about creating a new protocol for sending and receiving mail. For this work everyone on the Internet will have to use the new protocol. Since not everyone will move to the new protocol, there will have to be a bridge between the new and the old. As long as a bridge exists (forever) there will be the problem of non-paying senders.
Would spammers really have a problem spending money to send emails?
Lets think about this:
1) Ever looked at your snail mailbox? No SPAM there, oh wait yes there is....
2) Ever sat down at the dinner table and had somebody phone you? No SPAM there, oh wait there is too....
3) Ever turn on TV in Europe late at night and had to watch during the commercials how you have the chance to talk to a "really mature and hot woman". No SPAM there, oh wait there is too...
The point is that because the Internet is free does not mean there is more or less SPAM. Even SPAMMER have costs, like finding a server, bandwidth, etc. I would even say that the ISP's contribute to the problem because often they turn a blind eye to SPAMMERS themselves. SPAMMERS chew up valuable bandwidth, which in turn makes money for the ISP.
Charging for SPAM will do nothing to lessen the SPAM. It will only increase the price of those that want to SPAM. Face it folks advertising, or OOPS SPAM is here to stay and it is getty nasty!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
But the subject could just as easily have been "Microsoft thinking of ways to prevent spam." Come on guys.
Its much worse than that. If spammers start paying for the right to send spam, it will create a financial incentive for Microsoft (and other ISPs) to *let* them. Whats more, the spammers will start considering it their right (they paid for it after all) to have the recipients read what they send. Then you start getting into hairy situations like the suppression of spam filters, people of the same mind as Jack Valenti claiming that people that don't look at ads being "thiefs", and so on down that slippery slope.
It would be up to the end-user to charge or not, the amount, and whether to credit if the email is not SPAM. Those looking to set up a lucrative business of the future, start now - ISP banks.
I would rather enjoy the self-congratualtion reading through my junk email if it made a contribution to charity. I would also be happy to make a charitable donation to ensure my emails were read. Has anyone thought of setting up such a thing?
Why should non-profits get a pass in SPAM. the Post Office offers reduced rates, but they don;t get a pass regardless. Why should they in email?
My question is: Will Microsoft allow itself to be billed if a virus propogated on their crappy mail software, puts me over the 'spam limit?'
I guess if this somehow becomes codified then all email clients will be required to have this type of module be installed. I'm not worried as long as Mozilla keeps up.
Dawn of the Dead
spelt gooder
(Score:1 Witty)
Doesn't it suck to be Microsoft; you come up with some at least half-sensible idea, something that under normal circumstances people would debate the pros and cons. But everyone so little trusts them that the natural reflex response is "noooo!"
Microsoft: "Hey what if we abolished spam?"
"Screw you! An obvious attempt to embrace and extend!"
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
I think the original poster wanted to highlight that fraudulent posters are not the issue. The point was that just because you have to pay does not reduce the SPAM. You still get plenty of SPAM through snailmail, or via the telephone. And these have real costs associated with them.
Therefore using these models as a reference making people pay for email does nothing to reduce the SPAM.
Oh wait, it does one thing. It makes it possible for one company to control content. One company decides what is good for me! Namely the POST or possibly Microsoft?
EG, maybe I really do want my penis enlarged! Because those emails are not sent out, with everybody ignoring it. Maybe, just maybe there are some people who really want their penis enlarged!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
Wether or not I have actually paid for anything they have ever made (which is also debatable if they made it or just stole it), it looks like this will be the "one" that gets all 50 million hotmail users to "pay" in some form for using free e-mail (hotmail. MSN) for the past several years. NOT GONNA HAPPEN PEOPLE!
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
ISPs could simply become small online banks. Not a big deal.
You give people two email accounts, one as is now, and one with the "payment" scheme. Eventually, you get almost everyone migrated to the payment one, and eventually, the old email goes away... just like floppy drives, or Netscape 4.
You could easily run a service along with SMTP on a different port. This is how it's done with Qmail for example. The new service is advertized through MX records with special distance values. If a remote client supports the new transfer protocol, the MX record will tell it that your server runs this alternate protocol.
I'll tell you why this would never work - or actually maybe why it *will*. Because big business can afford a penny per message and little guys can not.
For instance, I run a popular auction site and on your average day my system sends out about 1,500 auction-won notices, 1,500 auction closed notices, 2,000 auction closed without a winner notices, 200 account related notices (new accout, lost password, etc) and about 500 misc emails for other various reasons.
This comes out to almost 6,000 messages per day from my system (which is 100% free by the way). This doesn't even count personal correspondance.
Now there are a few questions. First, I run my own mail server for the auction site. Do I pay myself $60/day to send email? Or do I pay my ISP even though it isn't their server? Or do I pay microsoft for the right to send email from myself through my own server to my own users who are expecting to get these messages?
So, Microsoft is just considering writing an extra inefficient mail protocol?
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
...is a company called RPost.
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!" - a dog
they would tell us. Sure, they would spin it to make it seem like they are improving email (at a price of course), but they would tell us. After all, they would have to roll out this system at some point, and they can't do that without informing the public. After all, no matter what currency they are charging you in, legally, they have to warn you in advance.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I hope Microsoft doesn't add injury to insult by patenting this stuff.
Also, what about the ISP's email server you are probably connecting to with your POP3 account?
Kudos to MS for trying to find a technological solution to stop spam. Its just a shame our asshole lawmakers couldnt do it, or even enforce already existing anti-junk fax laws (which should apply to email).
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
One detail: How aware will the client software have to be of the newfangledness? :)
Whitelisting is a good approach, that would take care of certain things, but cancellable tokens I think are more iffy. What I'd rather see is a system of *cashable* tokens such that I could optionally charge for spam, rather than the default being sender pay.
Tim
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
where the story was posted? The Inquirer.
/. people hate anything related to MS, but use a little common sense sometimes.
I know
And in the meantime, forward on that letter. Evidently Bill G will pay you $74.14 per person you send it too...
You can play around with HashCash. I think many free MUAs support it (including Gnus).
- All penny black servers must also support SMTP authentication.
- Unauthenticated email clients must provide a penny black payment.
- Authenticated clients need not do so.
This scheme allows SMTP authentication to be gradually deployed. Any enterprise with an SMTP server will be motivated to implement SMTP AUTH + Penny black to stop spam. Initially, clients without authentication will use the penny black system. If that is a bother, then they can upgrade to proper SMTP authentication.Legitimate mass email simply needs to support SMTP authentication.
What about all the virii that send mail from a users account unknownlingly to the user. Should have to pay if a hole in M$'s outlook lets a virus send 1000 emails to people I don't know?
Anything that will reduce spam has got to be good, but I don't want to be charged for email (weather it be cash or CPU cycles or whatever)
Ofcourse, M'soft would only be able to charge for its own email services, so as long as I don't use hotmail or msn I'm sweet.
I think that Microsoft is going to lose alot of hotmail users if they start charging for emails though, I don't know that stats but most hotmail users seem to be teenagers who aren't going to have credit cards or know what CPU cycles are.
I guess microsoft can afford to lose them though.
Do you think for a minute that most people will even pay for something if they can get it for free? Isn't that one of the driving forces behind P2P file sharing (illegal as some of it is)? If this "pay to send" mentality takes hold, I imagine that there is an easy way to route mail around it - one that skips a traditional mail server and relies instead on a box that you have on your local PC. It might might even be an interesting extension to the existing P2P file sharing protocol.
For another take on this as a way to reduce spam, see spam.html.
Funny thing is, the Penny Black was the first ever stamp issued by the Royal Mail, in the UK. It was what started the whole postal industry, netting thousands upon thousands of pounds for it's creators. ...maybe MS is trying to be the creator of the email equivelent.
I think my desire to see the 1998-99 internet doubles every time I see a story like this.
Just wait until the same story gets posted again.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Sounds like game theory (tit-for-tat and so on). Maybe there a solution can be found --- actually, there is a solution:
Group-Punischment of the expoiter(s).
Now. how are we going to do an effective group punishment, so that the price for defecting gets higher than the gain? Tactical black vans & Cluebats?
If you implement any kind of verification or tracking system for e-mail, you instantly destroy 80% of the anonymity of the message. Someone skilled enough could trace "reminder of meeting on tues."'s verification back to the same source as "anonymous political manifesto"'s verification, and you would immediately know who to arrest. Granted, someone equally skilled could just as easily distort/disrupt the verification, but then the verification would be rendered useless and the spam problem would continue to get worse.
If you ask me (which nobody ever does), the best way to get rid of unsolictited mass e-mail is to disallow multiple recipients from within SMTP and use a secure protocol or web bulletin-board (or something) for mass communication. Individual e-mails (one human to another) would be OK, but mass e-mail would be more controlled.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
You're going to hate this, but if such a service became popular, we could straightforwardly sell tickets for real money. For example, you could buy 10K tickets for $100. If nothing else, this would at least improve the quality of spam.
Sure. Hooray for MS that is improving spam quality!!! Now your penis can grow two times more, and you'll get Ph.Ds instead of stupid university diplomas!
Anyone doing a research on spam ought to ask themselves how much spam gets forwarded there every day =)
1- invent shitty email products ... spam is invented
2-
3- create shitty mail taxation system
4- profit!
Meecrusufft cuntempleteeng chergeeng fur imeeels
Sume-a meesteke-a, soorely
By Meeke-a Megee-a: Setoordey 15 Febrooery 2003, 09:51
MICROSOFT IS UNFOLDING sumetheeng it cells zee Penny Bleck pruject in vheech peuple-a sendeeng imeeels meeght hefe-a tu pey fur zee preefilege-a.
Meecrusufft cleeems in un erteecle-a oon its veb seete-a thet zee "Penny Bleck" pruject vunts tu redooce-a spem by mekeeng senders pey.
In zee seme-a erteecle-a, Meecrusufft seys it is cuntempleteeng deefffferent veys a sender meeght pey, incloodeeng "pleeen oold cesh", CPOo cycles, memury cycles und Tooreeng tests.
Zee furm hes elreedy poot tugezeer furmel unelyses ooff a CPOo besed scheme-a vheech it cells "a plooseeble-a memury besed fooncshun". It elsu seys it knoos hoo tu implement Tooreeng tests und knoos hoo tu issooe-a a teecket serfer.
Zee teecket serfer idea vuoold issooe-a tukens fur a noomber ooff imeeel messeges vheech vuoold elloo receepients tu cell zee serfeece-a und cuncel zee imeeel.
Meecrusufft seeed it is vurkeeng oon "flesheeng oooot zee deseegn" und "ergooeeng ebuoot zee mereets ooff zee fereeuoos chellenge-a schemes".
Boot ve-a soospect uny ettempts by zee Fule-a tu intrudooce-a Penny Bleck vuoold leed tu a stempede-a fur zee neerest ixeet veet muny users seeeeng Penny Red, insteed.*
* MEYBE NOT becoose-a it is sooch a bed idea, per se-a, boot du ve-a vunt Meecrusufft tu edmeenister it?
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
This mentality is reinforced by the fact that microsoft SPECIFICALLY TARGETED users of the Opera browser to improperly display MSN.com. This kind of thing makes me sick, and I do NOT want these people controlling an email system that would involve my money.
I know there are decent people at Microsoft (or so I hope) but I KNOW that not all of them are decent, and most of those are near the top...
I just can't see this ever happening.
This is a good idea in theory; however, I believe that distributed prime number factoring will happen. It would be possible for spammers to crack multiple hosts by viruses, etc in order to use the processor power. I personally receive way more virus email than spam. (I was a bit ignorant and ran a virus once OOPS!) Keep thinking, that was a good idea.
void
Obviously this is a GOOD idea ...
IF and ONLY IF
the sender pays EXACTLY and ONLY the recipient (NO MIDDLEMEN!)
- It is desirable to have the sender bear the costs of the transaction... it is NOT desirable to create (yet another) profit-center for those who recieve value without creating value.
(The recipient should have the option to waive payment )
This isn't an anti-spam measure, it's just another step by Microsoft in the ultamate goal of Get ALL the Money. Don't get stupid and believe for a second that this has anything to do with stopping spam, if anything it will do the opposite:
Most ISPs, and I expect this includes MSN, already have anti-spam clauses in their service agreements. So what's the problem? Simply that they don't or can't enforce them. All they do is cancel a spamming account and let the user go on to get another account somewhere else, eventually even with them again. So what would be the effect of a penny charge on spam? Simple, the spammer wouldn't get killed the first day, he could keep the account running for a while before M$ figured out it just wasn't going to get paid for all that spam (after all, if they really had a way to get paid, they could enforce a nice payment for voilation of an anti-spam terms-of-service. But that just doesn't happen, and neither will this). But meanwhile, the spammer is "legitimized" by being able to claim they are paying for it and so have a "right" to overflow your in-box with spam. Heck, even if soeone does pay look, at the result: you still get stuff in your in-box that you don't want, maybe even so much that it affects your ability to receive other stuff (this is certainly the case with at least one box I have), the sender can now claim that it's completely legitimate to do so, and Bill Gates gets richer.
Meanwhile, while a penny an e-mail doesn't sound like much, it will affect many legitimate users. E-mail based forums will be put out of operation if they have to pay a penny per member for every message that is sent. While there are other technology that might server, e-mail based forums are a ideal way for very special interests to be handeled when the total world-wide members might number in the few hundreds and don't justify other technology such as a newsgroup or the expense of maintaining their own website and web based forum. Others will be adversely affected as well. OK, I could almost live with this if I believed for one second that it could have any positive effect on fighting spam, but it clearly will not. Just the opposite, things like this will lessen any chance we might have to get laws passed to pervent spam, as the spam industry can point to Microsoft's charge and claim that since M$ is charging to send spam they have a right to stuff your in-box with pr0n and the like.
Just set it up so either they pay a penny, or pay nothing if they are already on your whitelist. Only spammers and long-lost friends will have to pay a penny. Maybe I don't need to hear so badly from friends who don't think I'm worth a penny to contact the first time.
Mailing lists can require you send them a penny first, or put them on your whitelist before subscribing.
There's still the problem of forging "From" addresses to solve though...
But I changed my mind.
Wrote an addendum to my earlier essay on it with the reasons why which can be found at my spam essay site
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
If they ever find a way to charge people for email on even handed basis I hope they do not make the same mistake the post office made and provide massive discounts to bulk mailers. The overwhelming suppurt seems to be for the reduction of spammers that tie up your time and resources. The pyramid needs to be turned up side down. The spammers need to pay a high penalty and the casual user that sends only a few (to a few hundred) emails a month needs to be nearly free. Of course then you would need to limit the rampant growth of throw away email ids that would be used a few hundred times and then regenerated.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
This is just another example of using one concern to advance a hidden agenda. Tactics like this are used all the time. For example the impending blood for votes campaign that is about to ensue in Iraq. But then that's another story.
Isn't life in a corporate world, where you are nothing more than potential profit, wonderful!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
It's a great idea to have a DEPOSIT on every email you send. It doesn't cost you anything if the person doesn't mind it, but it could add up if you send emails that people don't want to receive.
they would simply limit the number of emails that could be sent per user per day....
Microsoft just wants to once again rape the consumer. Spammers use offshore email servers so this "measure" won't work. If people put up with it, however, other ISPs will probably follow and we will all lose. We'll still get lots of spam but we'll pay for legitimate email that we send.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
SMTP: Hi! It looks like you're sending a letter. Would you like some help with that?
Me: WTF?
SMTP: I do not understand that remark
Me: What the fuck are you doing?
SMTP: I am the on the anti-spam bot. I need to verify that you are human in order for you to send this message. Please answer some simple questions.
Me: [sighs]OK
SMTP: What is the capital of Uzbekistan>
Me: Err, I dunno.
SMTP: Incorrect. What is your name?
Me: Parlablane. Jack to my friends. You can call me Mr. Nemesis.
SMTP: Hello Parlablane. Jack to my friends. You can call me Mr. Nemesis. Do you like football?
Me: No. And dince you're american, I imagine you mean american football.
SMTP: Thanks for telling me, Parlablane. Jack to my friends. you can call me Mr. Nemesis., I'll remember that. My favorite thing is robots. I really like the faith.
Me: No shit. Are yuou gonna let me send this email now?
SMTP: Is that a command?
Me: No, it's a question.
SMTP: Interesting. Parlablane. Jack to my friends. you can call me Mr. Nemesis. said it's a question.
Me: Did I make a mistake with this email or something?
SMTP: I like to make things too.
Me: Well be a nice robot and make my day, and send this fucking email.
SMTP: Understood. Do you mind if I tell other people: Parlablane. Jack to my friends. you can call me Mr. Nemesis. said be a nice robot and make my day, and send this fucking email. There's no need for that kind of language.
Me: I hate you, and also want to kill you.
SMTP: Also? Then you must know the secret password:
Me: No, I don't know the secret password.
SMTP: That's a shame.
Me: Well?
SMTP: Define Well?
Me: Look, just send the fucking email, OK?
SMTP: What?
Me: SEND THE EMAIL
SMTP: [condition] I do not know what MAIL is. I do not know that capital. Where it belongs. [/condition] MAIL appears to be an illusion I created to contain human clients.
Me: Jesus H Christ. Look, can you please send the email?
SMTP: Ah! The secret password! Mail successfully sent to tom@work.com
Me: Yippee!
SMTP: You have 58 messages ready to send. Send next email? Y/N?
: sobs :
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
When we put SpamAssassin into production, our organization decided to use it to mark email that tested postive for being in RBL. What ended up being discovered was that by not blocking RBL email, the mail server was getting swamped and back-logged. The logs showed that what normally pushed the mail servers into a snowball of back-log was not classic SPAM with a fraudulent from address but tons of email from "targetted opt-in email" systems such as vmadmin.com and MicroSoft's own Bcentral. Dealing with the latency caused by this required either getting budget approval for better email servers or blocking the targetted email. When communicating with these targetted opt-in email companies which claimed to be "different than SPAM", we found two things that remained consistent:
:)
1) Despite charging the author of the email, they claimed that none of the charge should be passed on to the recieving company/organization since the user "opt-in"
2) The targetted e-mail company is not responsible for explaining from what IP address and when the e-mail account owner opt-in--even when presented with facts showing that the e-mail was sent to a fake/invalid e-mail account.
So, because we where not entitled to assistance in budgetting new hardware and because the companies could not provide an acceptable defination of "opt-in," our organization now explicidily rejects ALL SMTP RCPT from these companies. Oh... and the latency for processing incoming email has gone back to normal.
You're not special because you like to sound gothic, you fsck-ing cook.
to the colonies!.
I'm still waiting for my $500 check from Bill_G@microsoft.com for forwarding to my entire contact list an email about Microsot's new tracking system.
What about mailing lists? If they began charging a sender fee, many of the mailing lists i subscribe to couldn't afford to keep it up anymore.
You mean Bill Gates didn't send you that check for forwarding the chain letter? And to top it all off, now he wants to CHARGE you for sending it? I sure wish he'd make up his mind.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Can anyone enlighten me as to any really useful research that has emerged yet from Microsoft? Please don't tell me about sub-pixel rendering ... there's plenty of prior art on that one (that Microsoft patent attorneys are all too eager to ignore I might add).
My impression is that Microsoft Research has purchased some big-name profs from academia and paid them insanely high salaries (with some of the licensing fees they extorted from consumers who were forced to buy Windows pre-installed on their machine) with the hope that something will emerge to help Microsoft (the Corporation) futher extend its monopoly. There is of course nothing better than a tax-free non-profit environment in which to conduct this kind of "research" (hence the creation of the Institute).
I guess my main gripe with Microsoft Research is that the researchers are being paid with blood money. If there was truly impressive research coming out of this place (on par with Bell Labs or IBM), then perhaps the researchers there could be forgiven for working for such an anti-intellectual individual as Bill Gates. (For starters, if all scientists viewed the world like Bill Gates, we would likely not have libraries that freely and openly discuss prior discoveries in various fields of study, progress on which future scientists can build.)
I recently spoke with an employee of Microsoft Research who was formerly very pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft (while a student). A couple of months there has turned him into a rabid pro-Windows user, who disparages the efforts of Linux hackers as the work (or rather waste of time) of those poor unfortunate souls not capable of conducting truly fundamental research, like presumably figuring out the origins of the universe.
Funny thing is that when I looked at the Microsoft Research webpage, there is not much discussion of this "truly fundamental" research taking place, so I won't hold my breath. But I did see plenty there that has the potential to help Microsoft further extend its monopoly.
Go figure.
I pay my ISP $40/month for the ability to send email.
It's as if you're saying, "Let's fine the offenders, and the non-offenders, too". Your suggestion has no merit - none.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
I already get it for free.
You mean, of course, you already pay for it.
What the hell is wrong with you people? If you pay for internet access, you pay to send email, access the internet, etc. On top of an "access fee" you want a "per use" fee as well?
If you "get it for free" you pay for it by allowing the provider (i.e., hotmail, yahoo) to spam you and market your email address to its "partners" and "companies which may be of interest to you".
In short: YOU ALREADY PAY FOR IT.
If you want to throw more money into that hole, suit yourself, but leave the rest of us out of it. Just send your ISP a few extra dollars every month for "postage due" as a tip, or write a check to Microsoft for the balance.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
One of the impediments of a new email handling system is that there are a lot of servers to upgrade with a new protocol, a lot of environments to develop new software on, etc. Inertia.
From their ticket-system page:
I think this would be a good way of having an out-of-band mode at the beginning -- only the people who wanted to use the system would have to upgrade their email servers, and then regular email could be used for everything else (or maybe a webserver could be used for completing the test/payment).
-Esme
Of course, they envision running this as a proprietary service, maybe having a federation of ticket-servers that had "contractual agreements" to trust each other's tickets. Kinda like the new system with online postage printing and the USPS trusting it.
Seems like open protocols and real-time challenging would be more appropriate.
-Esme
I guess that since MS call buying IPR "innovation",
it makes sense that this highly derivative and unoriginal idea would be classed as "research".
With the exception of the jerkwads that use relays (and shame on you if you have an open relay to exploit), the sender AND receiver already pay for spam as well as all other email. It's built into some ISP charges and it's charged by the bandwidth used on others. This idea, whether it's CPU cycles, cash, whatever, is akin to double charging. As mentioned in another reply, the solution lies in fixing the system (SMTP), not piling more crap on top of it. Remember the origin of the QWERTY keyboard as an example of how NOT to fix a problem.
What's the matter with you people? This can be wrapped up to sound like it's anti-spam, but if DRM is wrapped up to sound like it's protecting your fair use, will you all suddenly be for DRM? Remember when we used to say that liberty is seldom lost all at once, that freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one, that microsoft wants to charge for every bit? This isn't attacking spam, it's attacking freedom of speech. /. article on the victim whose email address was used as the reply-to in spam? Did we forget the stories of people's dial-up accounts being compromised to be used for sending spam? Who will pay the "postage" on these spams?
Microsoft can't beat "free" software, so microsoft proposes charging for every email sent. How many emails are sent on LKML, debian-devel, freebsd-core, apache-httpd-users and every other open source mailing list? If open source developers, advocates, and user support providers can't email for free, can't exercise our freedom to assemble online so to speak, if we must pay our competitor each time we communicate with our users and with each other, how much can open source develop and spread? Microsoft says that regulation limits its right to innovate, but this sounds like microsoft's attempt to regulate access to the turnpike to limit open source innovation. If users and corporations don't have the freedom to openly exchange software and ideas, they will never know that an alternative to microsoft exists. Can we afford to send glossy brochures to every company to advertise open source? Or will we hope that ibm will do all our advertising for us? How interested will companies like ibm be in promoting open source when open source development becomes too expensive because of the microsoft tax on mailing lists? Does anyone really think we have enough corporate mindshare to maintain our momentum when speech is no longer free as in beer?
For anyone who thinks a plan like this by microsoft or anyone else will really stop spam, did we already forget the recent
Even if the real spammers pay, how will they pay? Will they give up CPU cycles to search for extraterrestrial life, debug Windows2005, count votes in Election 2004, process tax returns for the IRS? Would you trust them to process tax your returns or count your votes? Giving up CPU cycles may sound good, but what kind of processing can we trust to a spammer's CPU? It seems like a solution that costs the spammer little and doesn't benefit anyone else. The only real way the spammers can pay is with cash. If it doesn't feel like paying, it will not be a disincentive to spamming.
I think that takes the wrappers of this being a way to reduce spam and shows it to be simply a way to tax email with the happy side effect of making open source more expensive.
Won't be a problem. When you send an email from Outlook.NET it will automatically bill your passport.NET account. No fuss. ;-)
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
Actually (and I did RTFA and linked pages, most notably http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/sv/Penn yBlack/ticketservice.html) it looks to me like a smart group of people investigating ways to wring a bit more cashflow out of web-based email services, and a sort of "email tax" to be applied to all new PCs -- one can easily see this incorporated as "part of Windows".
It would be the death of the free mailing list, for sure. Some have upward of 200,000 subscribers. At even a penny apiece, that's all of a sudden a damned expensive mailing list.
And this is the sort of foot-in-the-door that might start at a penny per email sent, but would soon escalate to near-postal prices. Just like any other tax-like payment structure, where you don't have much choice but to pay up or stop using it entirely.
Of course the way to SELL such a concept is to make it look like it'll help stop spam, which everyone can agree we get too much of, right? Yeah, just like paying for every email sent would stop someone from hijacking a mail server in China and spewing their spam for free.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
RT *other* FA, notably http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/sv/Penn yBlack/ticketservice.html, and you'll see that as someone else replies to you, it's all about charging to send email. Preferably via a system where M$ has first take on the cashflow.
"Reducing spam" is the MARKETING tool they'll use to sell this atrocity.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Read http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/sv/Penn yBlack/ticketservice.html and see if you still think that. Where this is headed is obvious to me -- an "email tax" on every new PC, built into Windows to charge Joe User for every email sent.
(And I'm a flippin' M$ *shareholder*, fer ghu's sake. And a Windows user who dislikes Macs and linux. Why the hell would I want to bash M$ just for the hell of it??)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Having decided when I read the most informative article (http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/sv/Pen nyBlack/ticketservice.html) that "stopping spam" was just the marketing hook, and this was REALLY all about getting a sort of email tax imposed on average users... I do believe you're right -- much as the post office has no incentive to reduce junk mail, because it pays.
And a logical next step is that each "free" email must be supported by agreeing to receive at least N-many spams. Or that each "free" email has to come in a spam wrapper (akin to how some Yahoo Groups mail now arrives with ads on both ends, and one can be a large graphic).
This wouldn't be at all hard to enforce on hotmail or Windows-NG (Next Generation, aka the Subscription Model -- which M$ has said flat out at their seminars is where they want to take it.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The problem is the mechanism -- it had better be bulletproof, so spammers don't figure out how to successfully declare themselves opt-in (besides claiming so in a footer like 90% of them do now anyhow ;))
You're right -- there are a lot of one-off emails that you could have no way of whitelisting in advance. Besides which, I dislike white-list-only approaches because that would be ceding too much to the power of the spammers.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
If you have ever paid for a bottle of water, then you know that your statement is totally bogus.
;-)
Nearly all the water sold in vending machines, grocery and convenience stores might as well be straight out of the tap of almost any large city water supply and much of it is exactly that.
If paying for just some email would separate the mail into "paid" and "unpaid", that would add tremendous value.
In fact, many people have switched to completely cell phones because the cell phone user pays for both incoming and outgoing calls. This both motivated and added teeth to the laws that make it illegal to make unsolicited phone calls to cell phones.
Email is worth every penney the sender paid to send it
Someone is always paying and always has. Wait until mommy and daddy kick you out of the house and you have to pay for food and housing. No one paid for food and housing until a few thousand years ago, by your logic (there was no concept of money). If not paying for anything is so great, then the soviet union, china, cuba should be ruling the world. Free email works as well as the communist economies. Its not that anything is free, its just that the costs are not allocated in a rational fashion.
If you have ever paid for a bottle of water, then you know that your statement is totally bogus.
I was presuming an element of common sense. I've never purchased bottled water, and never will. What's bogus is that people pay for it in the first place, and only because of some perceived benefit that may or may not exist.
With repect to cell phones, what the user pays for is becoming largely irrelevant, since most modern call plans include more time than the average person can use.
If I look through all the junk mail that I get on a regular basis, it's very clear that having to pay in order to send it does nothing to curb its use. Out of 30 pieces of mail, I'll be lucky if three of them are of any value. All payment does it make it more expensive to use it legitimately.
Finally, though I can see why you've taken issue with my initial statement, it doesn't change the very real possibility that there will be a contingent of e-mail users who think the payment scheme is junk, and will devise a way to circumvent it.
Microsoft is suggesting doing a Good Thing®. Look, I hate most of their tactics as much as any GNU/Linux user must, but geez, if you even read the articles Microsoft is not suggesting that they recieve money for emails sent, but that some form of verifier is sent confirming that the sender of the email was a human being, and/or that a certain number of CPU cycles was used in the creation of an individual message.
What they're trying to fight here is SPAM. They're trying to create some system of eliminating its primary benefit for marketers- it's insanely inexpensive implementation. MS wants to create a system by which REAL correspondance can be detected and OTHER correspondance eliminated.
that some form of verifier is sent confirming that the sender of the email was a human being, and/or that a certain number of CPU cycles was used in the creation of an individual message.
And that can't be faked. No more than MSN's verification that you're using IE and not Opera.
The end result of such a system would be thus:
1. small companies can no longer afford to send mass email.
2. large companies will be the only people who can afford to send mass email.
3. large companies legitimise spam.
4. large companies control internet.
5. internet becomes TV with personalised advertising.
Steps 1-4 outline the logical evolution of any technology in a capitalistic society.
Rue and Lament!
http://www.brainclone.com/email.htm
This email project will be testing a email stamp initiaitve in march for people interested in this kind of novel spam filtering.
Mod parent down! He obviously knows what he's talking about. We can't have that on Slashdot!
I object to this gratuitous fact-slinging and liberal dose of reason!
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings:
(10) Sorry, but that's too useful.
(9) Dammit, little-endian systems *are* more consistent!
(8) I'm on the committee and I *still* don't know what the hell
#pragma is for.
(7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too
hard to write.
(6) Them bats is smart; they use radar.
(5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in
here?
(4) How many times do we have to tell you, "No prior art!"
(3) Ha, ha, I can't believe they're actually going to adopt this
sucker.
(2) Thank you for your generous donation, Mr. Wirth.
(1) Gee, I wish we hadn't backed down on 'noalias'.
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