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...

[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!

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.