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.)

Comments

Remember the good old days...

[aerojad]

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.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[quacking duck]

It is rapidly being forgotten that things being free was one of the reasons why this internet thingy took off in the first place.

Much like freedom though, there are always the jackass minority that abuse it and wreck it for the rest of us.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[neuroticia]

[ hoping that's sarcasm ]

*laughs* One of the REASONS it's as popular as it is is because people decided to use it to make money. The web is not entirely built by good intentions.

Let's see. There's the ISP's and broadband providers... There's the online merchants who pay for banner advertising to support sites like Slashdot... There's the commercial companies who pay US to put them on the net and keep them on the net.

Granted, there's also blights-of-the-net like AOL, whom we'd all be better off without. But--if it weren't for the commercialization of the net, and the net's evolution into a commodity, then a lot of us wouldn't be here right now.

-Sara

Re:Remember the good old days...

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Much like freedom though, there are always the jackass minority that abuse it and wreck it for the rest of us.

Ah, the Tyranny of the First Defector: Whoever first decides to abuse a system reaps maximum reward, which (a) encourages more defectors and (b) reduces the willingness of collaborators to remain in the game. It happens because defection lowers the average benefit, but the defector doesn't care about average benefit. He cares only about his specific benefit, which can easily exceed the average.

The end result, though, is that the average benefit declines and the specific benefit decreases even faster until we're all stuck mucking around at a single, much lower benefit. Phoo!

nah

[awx]

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...

Just fix SMTP!

[crt]

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.

Re:Wow this article isn't what I expected.

[$$$$$exyGal]

This doesn't look like an anti-spam tool:

The Penny Black project is investigating several techniques to reduce spam by making the sender pay. We're considering several currencies for payment: CPU cycles, memory cycles, Turing tests (proof that a human was involved), and plain old cash.

This just looks like a group (of smart people) that are investigating ways to reduce spam.

--sex

Re:Easiest way to deter spam

[jrumney]

Since spammers most often hijack the resources of others to send their spam, making the "sender" pay directly will often hit the wrong person in the pocket. The real solution is to prevent the hijacking of resources in the first place. It does look like some of the Microsoft Research proposals (the Turing test idea in particular) might address this problem to some degree too, it will be interesting to see some more details once the research has progressed.

SMTP is too ingrained

[tpengster]

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

How about allow people 100 sent mails per day

[Buzz_Litebeer]

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.

Hmm.

[Forkenhoppen]

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.

Says more about Microsoft than about spam

[badzilla]

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!"