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

What's next?

[gearheadsmp]

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)?

Bogus

[frovingslosh]

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.

Re:RTFA

[Eric Damron]

No, this is about charging for email use. Spammers will always use open mail relays that are off shore to send spam. I can't think of any that will use Microsoft's servers to send it.

This is about making huge corporate profits by putting a small charge on a service that MILLIONS of people use. It' is all about greed nothing more.

The only thing that is different is that Microsoft expects to take your money and have you thank them for it!