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

Wow this article isn't what I expected.

[GreyWolf3000]

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 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.

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:Wow this article isn't what I expected.

[Ed Avis]

The idea of using CPU cycles as payment is not new, check out Hash Cash.

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

[kasperd]

I get about 500 a day (across 12 accounts)

I once got 36 million in 4 days. The spammer thought I had an open relay... I didn't. I hope the intended recipients do not miss their spam.

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...

[chriso11]

Except for messing up mailing lists, a neat way to limit spam would be to require the mail sender to factor a large number provided by the SMTP host. It wouldn't need to take too long - only 3 or so seconds on a decent computer, but it would really slow down spammers. If you need to send out an email to 20 hosts, it would take a minute, which isn't that bad. But if you were trying to spam 100000 addresses, that would require a good amount of time to crunch... Of course, the number to factor would need to be a good random number.

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!

Not such a bad idea, but who's running it?

[SpikeSpegiel]

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.

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...

Re:nah

[Mitreya]

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...

Well, yes, but from what I understand this pile of junk mail supports the post office. Now spam supports no one and steals resources from everybody's networks.

Also, junk mailers tend to be pretty good about removing you from their lists precisely because it costs money to send junk mail. When it costs money, they will not send it to someone who resents them enough to call with removal request. Again, spam has no such insentive... your email becomes more valuable with "active" mark, that's all.

Re:nah

[Guppy06]

"Actually, junk mail is sent at bulk mailing rates so low that in fact it costs the post office money, which they then pass on in the form of 1st class mail stamps."

Spoken like someone who has zero experience with bulk mailing.

"Bulk mail" is cheaper for the simple reason that it is a labor-sharing program between the USPS and the mailier. The mailer pre-sorts their mail (hence the official name "presorted mail") by region before handing it off to the post office. The finer the level of sortation, the less the mailer pays in postage. A mailer that goes so far as to sort down to the carrier route (putting the pieces in the tray in the order the delivery person goes down the streets) pays considerably less than mailers that sort just by three-digit zone. This is sorting that the USPS itself doesn't have to pay for, hence the smaller postage.

And on top of that, the mailer can elect to drop the mail into the mailstream closer to the delivery point. Mailers pay less if they're willing to drop the mail off in the destination zone themselves, and they even have the option of dropping the presorted mail off at the destination post office.

The price of first class mail versus standard mail doesn't subsidize standard mail, it pays for services that don't come with standard mail. Services like "forward to the recipient's new address," "return to sender" and the like. This is why putting "return to sender" on those CDs AOL sends through standard mail doesn't do a damn thing; they didn't pay for the return-to-sender option.

"All postal rate increases have to be set by congress,"

No, they're set by a board of governors appointed by the White House and approved of by Congress. Congress can only say "yes" or "no" to rate change proposals. Anybody that wants to make alterations to rates have to go through the board of governors.

"and the direct mailing industry has a powerful lobby,"

Yes, direct mailers have representation in the board of what the USPS refers to as "stakeholders," but they are far from the only stakeholders (ie. customers) represented there. For example, all bills must be mailed at first class rates, which means utility companies are interested in keeping first class postage down.

But this is all besides the point. There is no cross-subsidization between rates as you are suggesting. That is flat-out illegal and frequent GAO investigations have shown that this is not happening (and I dare you to find a link with unrefutable evidence to the contrary) (No, intentionally misleading "libertarian" opinion pieces don't count). And even if they were compelled to keep standard mail rates lower, the USPS still has the problem of paying for itself, as postal operations aren't subsidized by taxes.

All in all, the USPS runs a heck of a lot more reputible operation than, say, any Baby Bell or CATV operation. They don't have anywhere near the public oversight the USPS has, which gives them more freedom to abuse their monopoly powers. And in the end, these corporations care about their investors far more than their customers.

And if you want to talk about powerful lobbying groups, take a look at all the money UPS is throwing at Congress to have the whole thing shut down. The same UPS that has raised their rates higher and more often than the USPS. Hey, it keeps the shareholders happy...

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: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.

Bandwith charges?

[russianspy]

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!

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.

Re:What a dilemma!

[timothy]

Actually, I just wanted to make sure that the submission wasn't misinterpreted to mean that "Microsoft" was planning to implement this system, and that it's still ("just") a research project.

It sounds like a decent idea to me, but with certain thorns. The biggest one is What about legitimate, truly-opt-in mailing lists? Email is a genuinely low-cost communication method for non-profit groups (not just official tax-exempt non-profit groups,I mean all kinds of clubs, associations, groups of friends, etc.), and a per-email fee intended to hinder junkmail could also pinch a lot of people I wish it wouldn't. Maybe in the end that would be a fair tradeoff, but as spam filters get better (and ISPs get more aggressive about blocking spam on their side), I'm skeptical of that.

Also, some people send a lot of short emails; does charging per-email make sense vs. (for instance) per-byte?

And as for my opinions of Microsoft, well, you're free to read my earlier comments about Microsoft if you want to learn that;)

Tim

RTFA

[Keebler71]

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.

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.

how it works *and* stays free

[Willy K.]

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.

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!"

IM2000

[dmelomed]

http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html

it would never work

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Clarification

[Xeth]

We're considering several currencies for payment: CPU cycles, memory cycles...

So, Microsoft is just considering writing an extra inefficient mail protocol?