IBM Researcher Offers an E-Stamp Spam Solution

UnanimousCoward writes "This Internet Week article describes a research project by Scott Fahlman that looks to limit spam using e-stamps. Here is more detailed description of the system under his CMU homepage along with a link to the original paper." As crappy as it sounds, charging some tiny fee per email would cut spam dramatically. 207 of the buggers so far today. Hundreds of megs a month. I'd love to see something done.

Comments

No way.

[TrentTheThief]

Not bloody likely. Pay for email?

Check's in the mail.

Re:No way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another Idea to stop SPAM.

DDOS attacks against the advertised servers. ianal, but, that might even be legal as self defense (the police will not help) ...

cheers,

Re:No way.

[sethaw]

Check's in the mail.

No, the checks in the email!!

Yeah I know, that was lame but I couldn't resist.

Re:No way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean "Checks in the e-mail"

Re:No way.

[Alan Partridge]

No, I think he meant "The cheque's in the post"

Re:No way.

[stanmann]

Actually, I believe the original was "the Czech is in the male".

No!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupid idea. I refuse to pay to send e-mail. The best solution to ending SPAM is killing spammers with extreme prejustice. It's time for President Bush to launch operation "Kill Spammers Dead!". Want to increase my penis size? BAM! A MOAB just smacked you in the head.

Re:No!

[ChaoticChaos]

Haaaaaaaahahahaha!!!

i doubt it

[Anonymous Coward]

cut spam dramatically? how do you explain all the junk mail I get IRL? they pay for postage on that, you know....

Re:i doubt it

[slugo3]

think of how much you would get if sending junk mail was free

Re:i doubt it

[elmegil]

And they actually make some effort to make sure you're in the right demographic to receive that junk mail. You buy a house, you get home related junk mail. You have a baby, you get baby related junk mail. With spam, my dad gets breast enhancement offers, and my wife gets penis lengthening offers. I'm sure once my baby is old enough to have his own email, he'll be getting porn spam. The spammers have no limits of any sort on what they're sending or who it goes to, because they have nearly zero overhead. Put some overhead in place, and they'll get a lot pickier. Spam won't ever go away, but at least it'll stop being the huge waster of bandwidth it is today.

Re:i doubt it

[baltimoretim]

E-mail spammers have another advantage over their snail-mail counterparts: senders of traditional paper junk mail have to pay for printing the things. This extra cost associated with paper junk-mail is another check on how much of it you get. Per-piece costs depend on the size of the press run, of course, but say you wanted to send a 4-color, 1-page brochure to 100,000 addresses. You might pay .10 a piece for the printing, a $10,000 fee right up front. Your internet spammer, however, has the advantage of paying nothing to "print" their ad.

Re:i doubt it

[diablobynight]

This would also affect all those convenient emails that come to us from different companies though, like the daily dilbert, that I love, the emails that tell me I was outbid, the emails that tell me when my suit will be shipped out. I don't like this idea, not one bit. Who would get the money? Why should they get the money, my email server recieved the email and the other guys email server sent it out. two equal parts of work were done. who gets money, in this system, there are lots of issues I don't want to see arise, plus I fear privacy problems arising.

Re:i doubt it

[EvanED]

Of course has the disadvantage of having 99.99% percent of the recipients toss it without even looking at the content. I would guess mass (paper) mailings have a much higer rate of people paying attention, especially as they usually advertise something other than "Enlarge Your Penis" and often in fact target their ads.

Re:i doubt it

[Pharmboy]

The real irony is: All those fake emails about "Congress is going to start charging for email" that circulated in the 90s would be coming true.

Re:i doubt it

[ffidrelli]

Effectively, EStamps are not the solution. The easiest solution would be to "indirectly" transfer the cost to the sender, without adding fees for non-spammers, as follows:

You make sure mail is stored on the sending server, and that only a message header with a link to the message body is stored on the receiving server.

This way, spammers will either a) need their own server (which can unambiguously identified and blocked), or b) the spammer's ISP will have to store the millions of message bodies and handle all the generated traffic. This will give a good incentive to the spammer's ISP for getting rid of the spammer.

A nice side effect of this is that you get rid of fake originating server identification in headers, as a fake header would lead to no message body.

For this to work, it is important that the message subject be considered a part of the message body, not its header. Otherwise, spammers will try to put their message in the subject!
It doesn't necessarily even require the SMTP infrastructure change.

This change does not equire any change to the SMTP protocol. Emails can still be sent as they are now. But we add a new "MIME Type" with something such as:

MIME-Content-Link: (address/ID information)

All the message is is a standard message header with no body, but the above information, and a dummy subject "Subject: none". If a mail client sees the above it would have the option of retrieving it based on the address/ID information given.

Re:i doubt it

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

This would also affect all those convenient emails that come to us from different companies though, like the daily dilbert, that I love, the emails that tell me I was outbid, the emails that tell me when my suit will be shipped out. I don't like this idea, not one bit. Who would get the money?

Wouldn't you be able to give them an authenticating key so that they could send to you freely?

Re:i doubt it

[Total_Wimp]

Put 'em on your white list. Problem solved. you get all the great free stuff you want from whomever you want but the folks you don't know have to pay.

I even like the idea of the recipient being able to rachet up the price of the e-stamp or eliminate it if he so chooses. There could be an XML autoreply saying, "it costs $100.00 to send unsolicited email to this account." The charity and the sender harvest the price so the charity knows what to charge and the sender knows what the to pay. Your friends would call you and say, "dude, put me on the white list," and everyone else would go to hell.

You could even make it so everything charged over a certain amount goes to the recipient so you would be getting paid to get junk mail. Market effects would take over. People would stop complaining about spam either because they're getting less or they're getting paid and the click of a mouse would determine exactly by how much.

Oh yeah, and if you _want_ all the unsolicited stuff, all you gotta do is set the price to $0.00. Everybody would win.

TW

Re:i doubt it

[PhilHibbs]

especially as they usually advertise something other than "Enlarge Your Penis" and often in fact target their ads

Really that's the main problem IMO - the offensive nature of a large portion of spam. There's no way I would even try to persuade my mum to use email unless I could protect her from ever seeing this kind of crap.

Re:i doubt it

[grs1969]

By co-incidence Bob Cringely taked about this idea last week in his column at the PBS site. He explains the differences between email and paper mail spam and why this idea would work.

Re:i doubt it

[matman]

Pay the recipient. That way, recipients can charge whatever they like, and can authorize some sources to send for free.

This depends on a well established micropayment system and could be done without changing much in the way of the current system. You'd need a micropayment service, a new email header field and some client side modifications (or server side to be more smooth). The email header field would contain a token that would be given to the sender upon payment to the micropayment server. The account on the micropayment server could implement various policies - like, allow this sender to send me mail for free, give 20% of my earnings to my ISP, etc. The email client (or server on which the account lives) could just drop mail that doesn't have a valid payment token when it is received. Senders could have a configuration setting in their client that says, "auto pay any per message price that's less than 5 cents". Of course, email viruses could become more expensive given such an autopay option :)

That's just one possible implementation, but I think that the receiving mail server should receive the payment - to whom the mail server gives the payment would be an agreement between the ISP and the recipient.

Re:i doubt it

[neuroticia]

*laughs* Well, if the money goes to the "other guy's" email server, then the spam problem wouldn't stop at all now, would it? :p

"Okay, I sent out 10,000 emails, that's $500 if it's 5 cents apiece, Self--would you mind if I paid you later?"

So, any number of organizations might want a piece of the pie: government, backbone providers, ISPs, the host of your domain, the host of your domain's mail server, and/or the reciepient.

There are issues with each of these.

Besides, in order to be effective, the cost would have to be prohibitive. In order for the cost to be prohibitive, then it would need to be somewhere in the neighborhood of the cost of traditional printing + postage in order to cut the amount of spam down to the amount of junk mail traditionally recieved via snail mail.

5 cents an email--something that I personally would not want to be paying, due to the volume of emails that I send out for a variety of purposes (technical support, reminding mentally disadvantaged family members not to buy penis-growth formulas or log into the newest AOL password stealing scheme, etc.) would not be overly cost-prohibitive to the spammer. Even if the spammer only charges 1 cent more per email than the 5 cent email fee, they still make a tremendous profit because the software they have automates everything, makes it possible to send out millions, they don't use their own servers or resources, etc.

Forgetting the price thing here for a moment, this would require a change of protocol, because the current smtp protocol barely allows for authentication, let alone transferral of funds. IP spoofing, etc. is also far easier than forging traditional stamps, as is hacking into someone's server and having it send out enough spam to bankrupt the owner if safety measures aren't in place to prevent Joe Smith from sending out a few million emails at 5 cents apiece.

-Sara

Re:i doubt it

[aardvarkjoe]

This would also affect all those convenient emails that come to us from different companies though, like the daily dilbert, that I love, the emails that tell me I was outbid, the emails that tell me when my suit will be shipped out. I don't like this idea, not one bit. Who would get the money?

Wouldn't you be able to give them an authenticating key so that they could send to you freely?

The article says that there would be a whitelist. I assume that when you sign up for a mailing list, it would tell you to "add [x] address to your whitelist."

I personally like better the idea of having expensive ($1.00) stamps, that are paid to the reciever if they choose to redeem them. It raises the spam barrier far too high for anyone, but doesn't necessarily cost anything for legit mail. (Of course, in that system you need a whitelist as well.)

Re:i doubt it

[GnuVince]

Right now, spammers send billions of spam each day! Imagine how much it would cost them to send one billion emails if an e-stamp costs, let's say, 0.01$ (one cent). That's $10,000,000 each day to send the same ammount of spam. Don't you think the number of spam in your inbox would be lower?

Re:i doubt it

[unitron]

Unfortunately ol' Bob suggested letting PayPal handle the transfer of funds :-(

Re:i doubt it

[Anonymous Coward]

The proper overhead for spammers is at least equal to a full price, first-class postage stamp. Considering the speed and accuracy of delivery, the proper rate would be closer to FedEx, UPS blue label, or USPS express & registered mail rates. The post office should have a monopoly on all individually targeted ads, and they should all pay full price (no 3rd class, no pre-sort discounts). No other delivery--email, fax, phone, or anything yet to be invented--should be allowed. Violators go stright to Leavenworth, life without parole.

Re:i doubt it

[diablobynight]

How do you bill someone, how legal is it, if I send an email to an ex-girlfriend asking for my ring back and she took me off her white list do I suddenly have to pay 10$ for that email I sent. And what about people who spam from an accidental open relay, small company B accidentally sends up their mail server wrong, and they suddenly get billed a million dollars. And if it doesn't bill you on the first message, only on the second sent from the same address couldn't they just do what they do now, and send every email from a different address. This is a dumb idea, if people just stopped buying from spam, it wouldn't exist, but people do, so companies spam.

Re:i doubt it

[dingman]

I don't own a home - I get home related junk mail.
I don't have a baby - I get baby related junk mail.
I have a degree - I get junk mail from third-rate schools.

Somehow, I don't think that the cost is making them target very carefully. Heck, I get more junk mail printed on paper and sent through the US postal service than I do at all dozen or so e-mail addresses, and that includes the ones published in WHOIS records for my domains.

Re:i doubt it

[Bronster]

If you expect to be on the whitelist you don't attach a payment coupon, and hence you are either accepted by the whitelist, or bounce because you're not paid.

If the ex-girlfriend removes you from the whitelist then your email bounces. Well, it's not like she doesn't have a right to do that (or even add you to her 'blacklist and strip' collection, which takes the money you attached and deletes the message so she doesn't get to see it).

The whole point is that you either have a speaking (emailing) relationship with someone, or you offer them the option of taking a sum of money to consider talking with you, and they have the option of taking the money and still refusing to talk to you.

Re:i doubt it

[snero3]

Having worked a for a printing house that prints out these leef lets(normally for banks, large department stores etc...) I can say that it cost an absolute furtune to send these things out.

You have to take in account cost of the mailing data , printers, folding machines, letter stuffers(machine or human) grade of paper etc..... and finally the mass mailing cost (either hand delivered or through the post office).

basically it is not cheap which reduces the amount of crap you get. Given all of that can you imagine how much you would get it is was free?

Re:i doubt it

[matman]

It's perfectly legal. You have to pay to talk to a consultant? What's wrong with having to pay to talk to Joe Blow?

It would go like this:

You attempt to send an email, but you get a bounce saying, "In order to send me an email, you need to put X amount into the account Y." Upon receiving such a bounce, you would be prompted, "do you want to pay and send again?". If you hit, "yes", your email client would, via some payment scheme, pay the X amount into Y account. The payment server would issue you a digital, cryptographically signed, receipt. You would attach the reciept to the message and send it again.

People could choose to accept messages without payment from specific addresses, etc.

If the recipient, after having been paid, refused to accept the message, you could theoretically take them to small claims court or something.

This scheme presents two problems:
- We don't have an established micropayment scheme
- Can we handle so many bounces from an infrastructure perspective? We may want to build a more optimized email delivery protocol for this.

Not gonna happen

[obi]

I'd rather deal with filtering the spam I get, than have to pay for sending email.

Re:Not gonna happen

[poot_rootbeer]

I'd rather deal with filtering the spam I get, than have to pay for sending email.

How many emails do you send per week? (Assume that work-related email doesn't count, because it's all either internal to the company network or paid for by the company). Personally, I'd be surprised if I wrote 30 personal emails per week.

Say the first 1000 emails in a given month are free. Very few legitimate email users would end up having to pay for their usage, but spamhauses would either have to pony up some cash or stop sending mail to people who they will never get a sale from.

And how much time are you willing to spend maintaining spam filters? That's attacking the symptom, not the problem. By the time spam gets to your filter, the costs of transporting it across the net have already accrued -- all you save is the inconvenience of having to see it.

Re:Not gonna happen

[tomatobasil]

This simple minded end-user answer works for me : setup a half a dozen inboxes, a few for work, some for friends, more for topics or keywords, etc. Set your filters to route email to the correct inbox and default everything else to trash. It costs nothing and users never have to maintain a filter for all the possible spellings for 'penis' or 'viagra'. It doesn't stop the bandwidth problem but it is something users can do to stop their own personal spam floods .

People won't pay...

[TheShadow]

Any solution that involves paying for something that used to be "free" is not going to catch on.

A better solution would be to make people register for a signing certificate and require email software to sign all messages. At least that way people would know who sent spam... and a national spam blacklist could be created for certs that get a certain number of complaints filed against them.

Re:People won't pay...

[TheShadow]

Oops... let me apologize for in advance for using the term "national spam blacklist"... I should have said "international spam blacklist".

Re:People won't pay...

[mblase]

Any solution that involves paying for something that used to be "free" is not going to catch on.

Don't be silly, paying for things that used to be free is how the internet economy survived to become the thriving, economic powerhouse it is... um... today... er, that is....

Well, maybe you're right.

Re:People won't pay...

[stratjakt]

Any solution that involves paying for something that used to be "free" is not going to catch on.

Especially in light of the fact that probably 99 percent of everyone who uses email doesnt give a shit about spam. Whatever they get, they ignore, just like they hang up on telemarketers and throw junk mail into the trash can. Of course those costs dont stop marketing. It's just part of life.

To stop spam by charging for email, you'd have to make email prohibitively expensive --- when was the last time you were FedEx'ed some junkmail?

So you'd be not only be charging for something that used to be free, you'd be charging to fix a problem most frankly dont care about.

Re:People won't pay...

[Gortbusters.org]

National... international, who would govern this blacklist of spammers?

Mail clients should just give the option to deny people without a proper certificate. If certificates are hard to get than blocking a domain of certificates would help block the amature spammers.

Re:People won't pay...

[davemabe]

The solution you suggest will cost money as well, although it still might be the best solution.

Re:People won't pay...

[CAIMLAS]

But the amateur spammers aren't the problem. There was an article not too long ago that said something like 90% of the spam comes from a small category of several hundred spammers.

Re:People won't pay...

[georgehm3]

Please, it seems M$ has been successful in getting users to pay for Hotmail, and it use to be free. If a service is perceived to have more value, in this case filtering spam messages, then the consumer will pay for that service. I can see corporations subscribing to such a service, then it would trickle down to the average consumer.

Re:People won't pay...

[aechols]

That might as well be the last nail in anonymity's coffin as far as email is concerned.

Re:People won't pay...

[ByteMangler_242]

How about this for a system?
Send mail for free, for now
A $.10 charge from sender to you is scheduled in 1 week
If I know you, I click a link to whitelist you in a web-enabled DB. Charge is not processed, I get your mail in the future, no cost involoved.
If I blacklist you, I get a nickel, and the processing company gets a nickel for overhead processing clean mails.
It's free for you, and cheap for them!

Re:People won't pay...

[Slashed Otter]

Yes they will, they just won't pay with money. People will be more than happy to pay with a resource that they are pretty much wasting already...CPU cycles. Ask them to pay with CPU cycles and I don't think anyone will object. I've posted this link a few times, so one more won't hurt. HashCash is a scheme that allows a computer to easily and quickly force another computer to burn a certain amount of CPU cycles before continuing.

Take the case of SPAM. For most of us, a HashCash solution would result in our computers pausing for a second or two before sending out the message. For a SPAMer sending out 1,000,000 emails, the process would take 1,000,000 seconds (extremely ineffective) or requiring the SPAMer to purchase a machine with much more processing power (bringing the cost of sending SPAM above the threshold at which it is profitable).

I'm not sure why this type of solution has been almost completely ignored as a means of fighting SPAM. If integrated properly into SMTP and the major MTA/MUAs, it would be seamless to the end user and pretty much end SPAM as we know it.

Re:People won't pay...

[brakk]

1, charging for email to limit spam is like limiting freedom of speech by charging people to talk.

2, by charging even a small fee for email, you would cut out some spam from small operations, but you would also be giving a green light to anybody that is willing to pay for it. You wouldn't have any recourse to take to stop them anymore.

Re:People won't pay...

[Gortbusters.org]

Then maybe these people shouldn't get the stamps/certificates or whatever. Or maybe Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc should know to deny these guys.

Re:People won't pay...

[mph]

1, charging for email to limit spam is like limiting freedom of speech by charging people to talk.

Makes me want to run out and sue the phone company!

Re:People won't pay...

[GTRacer]

So you'd be not only be charging for something that used to be free, you'd be charging to fix a problem most frankly dont care about.

Are you sure most people don't care? They may not care about receiving spam in the general sense, but I suspect there's a great majority who either oppose or fear pr0n (and other individually-decided offensive content) and virus/script/hack-carrying spam.

I don't give a Bender's shiny metal ass about snail-mail spam because it can't hurt me. And it's easy to filter and toss or recycle. And I only get about 3 pieces per day.

Spam, OTOH, usually comes daily by the gross and for most people without advanced filtering tools, sorting the good from the bad usually means having to open some of the more ambigously-titled pieces. And then you get into trouble because a linked pr0n image hits your work web proxy and...

GTRacer
- Telemarketers, however, should ESAD.

Re:People won't pay...

[mph]

Any solution that involves paying for something that used to be "free" is not going to catch on.

Tell that to the cable television companies.

Re:People won't pay...

[MrFredBloggs]

"Any solution that involves paying for something that used to be "free" is not going to catch on."

Sure. I`d rather look at spam as being the `price` i have to pay for email, rather than pay an actual, real price just to save me from having to delete a few spam emails, which I can generally do without opening them. A sensible filter policy goes a long way.

Re:People won't pay...

[TheShadow]

That's totally different. Cable gives you more channels and in a lot of cases better reception of local stations. There is (arguably) added value with cable.

Where is the added value with paying for email? Is email going to get better?

Re:People won't pay...

[eyeye]

You dont give a shit about spam? whats your email address?

My sister is a relative newbie to email and stresses about spam - shes installed something for outlook express to help. She doesnt like her young daughters getting porn spam.

My friend who is no nerd by any stretch emails me asking how he can stop getting all the spam he does.

In short, you are talking total bollocks.

Re:People won't pay...

[eyeye]

Hashcash is very interesting but, like videophones, requires both parties to be able to speak it. This doesnt prevent software supporting it but it does make it hard to become a "wanted" feature.

It is the best solution I have heard so far, I have to say though that the web site doesn't do it justice. The text is hard to read and they should have a nice diagram to help explain and sell the idea.

Re:People won't pay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, it's not about paying to talk to each other....it's reflecting the ACTUAL costs of talking with someone. IRL mailers have no problem understanding this cost.

Re:People won't pay...

[Prior Restraint]

Less spam. Duh.

Re:People won't pay...

[kanniget]

I have often thought that this would be a good idea. Attach free CA certificate to your domain registration and then use it to issue certs for user accounts.
You could still use alias accounts, you would just have to create an cert for it.
If you required a valid cert to go with each email then you could block certs that are issued by a domain name just like the open relay block lists.
All of this work could be done by the mail servers and not the clients.
The best part of a procedure like this is that no actual email would get transferred and therefor it would cut down on the wasted bandwidth.
Also privacy would not be affected as the cert does not say who you are, just that the email is from a certified user.

e-stamp to stomp out spam? I think not

[Anonymous Coward]

Charging for spam will not stop it any more than it stops snail mail spam.

The spammers will simply pass the cost through to their customers who, granted, might become more discriminating in response but it will not stop them.

Re:e-stamp to stomp out spam? I think not

[roca]

It won't stop it, but it could slow it down a lot.

And for the spam that you did get, at least you get some money in return. That's not bad.

Re:e-stamp to stomp out spam? I think not

[Palos]

Yes, I don't know what I would do if they raised the price on getting a 2 foot long penis, or any of the other crap they spam me with daily. In fact I can't think of one product/service that I've gotten a spam about that I would even consider buying.

Bulk Mail Rates?

[dschuetz]

As crappy as it sounds, charging some tiny fee per email would cut spam dramatically

Yeah. Sure.

How much crap do you get a day in your postal mailbox? How much of that was sent with a $0.37 First-Class stamp? How much of that was sent with heavily discounted postage because of its "bulk mail" status? (I won't even go into how ordinary citizens end up subsidizing this crap, even junkmail from large companies that could afford a full-cost stamp).

How much you wanna bet that some kind of postage on email won't make much difference, as the cost will either be so low that most won't care, or there'll be ways for companies to get out of it (or to get a much cheaper rate)?

Sure, it might cut back some. Maybe. But remember how the big junkmail senders got cheaper rates in the first place: Lobbyists. So I wouldn't expect it to last.

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[Zueski]

How do ordinary citizens support junk mail since the US Post Office is fully self supported?

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[kasperd]

How much crap do you get a day in your postal mailbox?

About one per month. I'd be happy to get only one piece of spam by email each month.

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally agree with the non-effectiveness angle. If there's a buck to be made, it's no problem spending a nickel to get that buck. A more viable option, maybe a little off-color, but since maybe we've got the tech to do it now, is the "Assassination Politics" system:

http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm

I've been thinking about Mr Bell's idea for more than a while now, and I would sincerely like for someone to tell me what about it won't work. And how to implement it.

All feedback appreciated,
fred

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[dschuetz]

How do ordinary citizens support junk mail since the US Post Office is fully self supported?

When we mail letters, pay bills, etc., we pay 37 cents (or has it gone up again? I've lost track) per item.

When bulk-mailers mail crap to us at home, they pay a helluva lot less -- maybe like 12-25 cents per item (cost, not savings).

This despite the fact that most of the people sending us the crap are big corporations with huge budgets to pay for such mailings. The same for magazines -- it costs Time a lot less to mail a magazine than it would you and me to mail an equivelantly sized and shaped letter.

The fun part is that, as computers get more and more integrated into society, people are (1) writing much fewer letters, (2) sending cards and greetings over email, and (3) paying bills electronically. Which means that all that first-class income is going down, which means the stamps go up faster, which means (1-3) happen faster, etc. All the while, junkmailers still get cheap rates.

So, yes, we do subsidize junk mailers.

(and as for the other person who only gets 1 junk postal mail per day -- I'm jealous. I get about 3-5 a day, easily 20+ a week. Less than SPAM, but I can't imagine that any email stamp would be as expensive as even subsidized bulk mail.)

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever thought that it's much cheaper for the post office to deal with those "bulk mailings." For one they don't have to drive around picking it up, and two they are often presorted for their destinations.

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[CAIMLAS]

How do you manage this? Please let me in on this little secret, I get several a day.

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[Horny Smurf]

You seriously don't understand the postal system's finances...

When a little old lady sends a 0.37 hand addressed letter, there's a lot more, lot more processing work involved than when J bul mailer send out his metered/discounted mail. Jay Bulk mailer has typed out address, zip+4, AND, when he gives his stack of mail to the postal service, it's already sorted by zip code. The USPS just needs to ship it down the line.

I don't like junk mail (although spam bother me more), and I don't like paying $0.37 a stamp, but the fact is, without bulk mail money, that $0.37 stamp would be a hell of a lot more.

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[stuartkahler]

Mass mailers, such as junk mailers or your credit card company that mails out hundreds of thousands of statements each month, get a discount of around 1/4 to 1/3. They get this because their addresses are typed (easier to sort), they usually put on special sort codes at the bottom of the envelope, and most importantly, they pre-package the items by zone so that the USPS just has one big piece to send from, say, California to Idaho. When it gets to it's destination state, the package is opened and the mail is further sorted.

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[Mitreya]

All these issues were brought up before and explained... Let me see what I remember:

How much crap do you get a day in your postal mailbox? How much of that was sent with a $0.37 First-Class stamp?

Bulk mail has different rates mostly because the sender pre-sorts the mail and saves some work for the postal-office. It has nothing to do with subsidizing, in fact bulk mail helps subsidize the post office.

How much you wanna bet that some kind of postage on email won't make much difference, as the cost will either be so low that most won't care, or there'll be ways for companies to get out of it (or to get a much cheaper rate)?

Anything, even a very, very cheap rate would help. Not to say it would eliminate spam, but right now the costs are, in fact, ZERO. Spam is sent through stealing someone else's resources. Even .001c would be greater than zero. And the payment might leave traces to find the spam source.

Sure, it might cut back some. Maybe. But remember how the big junkmail senders got cheaper rates in the first place: Lobbyists. So I wouldn't expect it to last.

Actually, the big junkmail senders are kept in check by *other* lobbists that work for utility companies and such. Utility companies are *required* to send bills via first-class mail, so they have some interest in controlling the first-class rate.

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[EvanED]

...But how much of the bulk mail you get is for penis enlargement companies? (Or maybe I don't wnat to know...)

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[Anonymous Coward]

here's some feedback for you fred.

Bell is a kook. A nut. Certifiable. His own lawyer argued that he was insane. That said, his idea can and does work. It's called organized crime. Maybe you've heard of the Mafia? They have a very similar system of putting out hits and remaining distanced from the hitters. They didn't need the Internet or PKI to do it either. And it's just as illegal. Aside from the practical problems with Bell's lunacy (what if two people bet on the same time? You can't have very good precision as official TOD is determined by a doctor or coronor and may be minutes or hours removed from the "assasination" to mention a couple) IT IS ILLEGAL. That's why Bell went to jail for trying to implement it. It is also ilegal to pay large sums of money without proper reporting.

Did you want a philisophical or logical objection? Bell's idea was to only put individuals who violated the NAP on the list. Bell is clearly one of these people (he's been imprisioned for stalking federal agents) so I guess he'd be willing to put his name on the list. If Bell is convinced that the system of "predicting" TOD is not conspiracy, why do the bidders need to remain anonymous?

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[Anonymous Coward]

"How much crap do you get a day in your postal mailbox?"

This is an inductive statement. It doesn't fly.

First, how much snail mail spam do you get when snail mail spamming is free? No answer huh? You NEED that number to compare.

Think about this... How many people get spam? How many of those people get the same email? I don't have the numbers, of course, but common sense will tell you they would have to send out hundreds of thousands, if NOT MILLIONS of mails. If they were charged $.01/mail on a million mails and you get OUT OF BUSINESS. Note, spammers send out spam to addresses blindly too... this would stop that totally.

I am NOT pro-charging for email on the internet... but I am pro-logic on the arguments for/against. yea yea yea, perhaps /. isn't a "perfect" stomping ground.

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[Obiwan Kenobi]

Just moved in, eh? ;)

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't even go into how ordinary citizens end up subsidizing this crap

Common myth, but incorrect.

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[linuxelf]

And, when you buy a steak at a steakhouse, you're subsidizing all the people who buy thousands of steaks wholesale.

When you buy a car, you're subsidizing all the people who buy cars by the hundreds for resale.

When you buy a computer you subsidize large companies who buy thousands of computers because they get a discount for large purchases.

What was your point again??

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[esme]

How much you wanna bet that some kind of postage on email won't make much difference, as the cost will either be so low that most won't care, or there'll be ways for companies to get out of it (or to get a much cheaper rate)?

I won't even get into how backwards you've got it on bulk snail mail...

The only reason that spam is profitable is that once you've gotten an internet connection and a mailing list, there is no additional cost to send more spam. So you can send out millions of spams for basically the same price as sending out a few hundred. This means that you only need a one-in-a-million response rate to make money.

No matter how cheap the e-postage is (even $0.001 per message), it will drastically change the economics of scale. When sending out those million spams now costs you $1,000, you suddenly need one-in-a-thousand response rate to be profitable. That will get rid of 99% of the pr0n, Nigerian scams, etc.

Of course, this won't stop everyone. The postage is bound to be cheap, and if you're running a legitimate business, it's still going to be a lot less expensive than paper mail. But if it can get rid of the worst of the spam, I think it'd be worth it.

-Esme

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[kasperd]

Just moved in, eh?

Yes, just moved in four years ago. Still haven't unpacked all my stuff.

Re:Bulk Mail Rates?

[skip lewis]

ok without stooping to name-calling, Bell is a "different thinker". and of course the system would be illegal. but these things are not showstoppers. the carbomb objection isn't significant. the TOD issue could be worked around. philosophically, putting only folks who violate the NAP on the list is very sound. and the bidders' anonymity is a luxury we can afford in this society, whose values are being defended even as we speak, with 1500 shells dropping all over iraq today. so. NAP.

anyway, i still don't see why AP wouldn't work. Bell may be onto something....

good luck fred

Re: I'd love to see something done

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't you set up your own filter, instead of promoting making email expensive!

No chance in hell

[Mossfoot]

Yes, it does seem reasonable, but

a) I'm used to having FREE email
b) Once you start charging for something, it's only a matter of time before the fees go up and up as high as it can "sustainably" go, and like stamps we'd be seeing it rise every couple of years.

Re:No chance in hell

[Junks Jerzey]

I'm used to having FREE email

So you don't have an ISP? And you're not paying semsesterly network fees at school (possibly rolled into a general student or residence hall fee)?

Re:No chance in hell

[Palos]

From the article, "It would sniff incoming E-mail and determine first whether a message is part of a recipient-defined whitelist of approved addresses. Those messages not on the list then would be scoured for a 10-digit code obtained from one of two sources" The point is that since most of the emails that you send legimately are to people you've already emailed before, you wouldn't have to pay. On the other hand spammers that blindly email out to millions of people would...

Re:No chance in hell

[The Evil Couch]

I have a friend that hasn't even owned a computer until recently that has been a regular online: sending emails, posting to forums, etc. thanks to public libraries. so yes, free email does exist.

Re:No chance in hell

[waveclaw]

So you don't have an ISP? And you're not paying semsesterly network fees at school

What's that Mom? Need to use the phone? No, I'll be off-line in a few minutes...

Re:No chance in hell

[lordcorusa]

Actually, yes, I do have free email. I run my own smtp and imap email servers (no relaying, of course). And I have a flat rate 1.5Mbps DSL ISP, rather than an ISP with a per-meg/gig charge (speakeasy.net plug ;-). So if I send no emails per day or 1000 emails per day, I don't pay one cent more or less. And if I get no spam or 1000 spams a day, I don't pay one cent more or less.

Sure, you can say that the amount of spam I download divided by the total amount of stuff I download is a quantifiable value, but that ratio is so small that it approaches zero ;-)

And sure, technically the three seconds or so it takes me to visually identify and delete all of a day's spam (that makes it through spamassassin) has a value, but I don't consider the value of a few seconds a day to be worth a change in the way I send email.

Re:No chance in hell

[Eraser_]

The key, if you even begin to skim the article, is that the fees are collected on a case by case basis. Your outlook or eudora or kmail or pine would have a button to push, "Collect" or "Reject". When your girlfriend sends you an email, you push "Reject", and you get the email for free (maybe reject isn't the right word, you are rejecting the fee only). When spammers send you an email, you push collect, and get .50 cents deposited into your e-stamp account.

At my rate, I would get 10$ a day for all the semi-spam stuff thats been signed up for by proxy. However I have my spam filters setup so I only get 10ish peices daily. The key to this working is everyone sending to you would need to be forced to use an e-stamp. There can't be exemptions for email lists, and order confirmations, etc, thats why telemarketing is still bothersome. However, Amazon could, by proxy, charge you the exact e-stamp fee (or 3, order conf, shipping conf, shipping problem), and tell you to simply collect your money back when you get the emails.

As a computer geek with a small circle of non-geek friends, I would personally help each one of them setup e-stamps with their email, and then simply begin flat-rejecting the emails from anyone who hasn't bothered. I think amazon and my credit card company can hire a geek to set this up for them.

Sorry, actually I tried to post to the article bel

[babyblink]

sorry really!

Really now, there is a much simpler solution.

[Chemisor]

Nearly all the spam I get comes from bogus addresses. If SMTP servers did not allow forging of the from: address, the problem would be drastically reduced since the spammers would have to get new accounts much more frequently, and most people would be able to block all the "free" email domains like hotmail and msn, where spam is most probably coming from.

Re:Really now, there is a much simpler solution.

[larien]

This is the problem of a system which was designed in a different environment. Much of the protocols in use on the internet were designed in a nice "fluffy" world where only the elite (not l337) were allowed in; computing scientists, some universities and the like.

Now that world + dog is online, we have all sorts of ne'er do wells screwing around in there, causing all sorts of trouble.

I'm pretty sure that the internet would not be designed as it is, given hindsight; there are just too many ways to screw things up, including the simple things like spoofed headers in email.

Re:Really now, there is a much simpler solution.

[agby]

That's a very hard thing to do when an email arrives in your inbox, to see if the original sender was genuine. Anyways, if I was going to send loads of spam I'd setup my own mail server that did allow forged From: headers as opposed to using somebody else's.

Re:Really now, there is a much simpler solution.

[fireboy1919]

You raise a very important point: the SMTP system is inherently flawed.

Why should any mail server be allowed to send you mail? There should be a whitelist for *that*.

Re:Really now, there is a much simpler solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

The easiest effective solution would be to "indirectly" transfer the cost to the sender as follows:

You make sure mail is stored on the sending server, and that only a message header with a link to the message body is stored on the receiving server.

This way, spammers will either a) need their own server (which can unambiguously identified and blocked), or b) the spammer's ISP will have to store the millions of message bodies and handle all the generated traffic. This will give a good incentive to the spammer's ISP for getting rid of the spammer.

A nice side effect of this is that you get rid of fake originating server identification in headers, as a fake header would lead to no message body.

For this to work, it is important that the message subject be considered a part of the message body, not its header. Otherwise, spammers will try to put their message in the subject!
It doesn't necessarily even require the SMTP infrastructure change.

This change does not equire any change to the SMTP protocol. Emails can still be sent as they are now. But we add a new "MIME Type" with something such as:

MIME-Content-Link: (address/ID information)

All the message is is a standard message header with no body, but the above information, and a dummy subject "Subject: none". If a mail client sees the above it would have the option of retrieving it based on the address/port/ID information given.

Re:Really now, there is a much simpler solution.

[tttttttt]

IANANP (I am not a network person), but

When you type in a url for a web page, that url (1) was previously registred with some centralized entity, (2) is verified to exist, (3) is mapped to its actual IP address, and finally (4) you are sent the data from that web page.

If it happens with web pages, then why not with email addreses? Require all email addresses to be centrally registered, and set up some legal reporting structure that designates some of these addresses to a "spam blacklist".

Then SMTP servers could verify that all incoming from address (1) actually exist and (2) are not on the official "spam blacklist". Discard anything that fails the test.

Walah!

(Not to mention this is realistically implementable *today*. :' )

Re:Really now, there is a much simpler solution.

[gowen]

Now that world + dog is online, we have all sorts of ne'er do wells screwing around in there, causing all sorts of trouble.

The only real problem is that of open relays (mainly in Asia, Latin America and Spain) and large ADSL/Broadband ISPs who don't give a fuck (RoadRunner, PacBell, SWBell -- this means you). If these were eliminated, forging From: lines would be irrelevant, since everyone would be easily traceable to their SMTP server where they injected the spam in the first place. Spammers are easily traced now, its just that their upstream providers turn a blind eye for the money.

Re:Really now, there is a much simpler solution.

[anonymous loser]

A nice side effect of this is that you get rid of fake originating server identification in headers, as a fake header would lead to no message body.

I guess I don't understand how this gets rid of fake headers. If a link to the original message body is included as part of the header, couldn't you just spoof that (to be appropriately linked) as well?

Why Pay?

[LynchMan]

Why pay for some type of filter when SpamAssassin is free (as in speech)?

Re:Why Pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhuh? And Joe Sixpack is going to install it right after he first figures out how to install XP?

Re:Why Pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tough shit, I'm not paying for email because Joe Sixpack couldn't find his own arse with a ten man working party.

Re:Why Pay?

[TheRaven64]

Why pay for some type of filter when SpamAssassin is free (as in speech)?

Free, and doesn't work. I've just upgraded our servers to SA 2.5, and while it catches a lot of obvious spam, spammers have started to adapt. I'm now getting one or two very chatty emails a day telling me about sites a 'friend' of mine has visited. They look like real emails, and could well be if it weren't for the fact that I don't know the people the come from, and none of my friends write to me telling me how well the viagra they just used worked (and no, I don't want them to).

The best solution I've heard suggested is that everytime anyone receives some spam they donate a small amount to an anonymous fund. When this fund reaches a required level a spammer is brutally murdered and 'spammer' is written in their intestines. Once spammers realise that sending spam can be fatal, they will stop.

(No I don't actually think we should kill spammers. Well, not all the time...)

Re:Why Pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly person, Linux users don't care about Joe Sixpack.

Re:Why Pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

One good thing about speaking language other than english is that filtering spam is really easy. Just look at what language the mail is written in.
If it doesn't match my whitelist and it is written in english, then mail is most likely trash.

Re:Why Pay?

[phil reed]

even though spamassassin is free, the costs are still there. you still have to pay for the bandwidth eaten up by the e-mail as it arrives at the spamassassin filter machine. Further you still have to pay for the machine.

Look into Habeas

[DuckWing]

habeas is a way to help prevent spam sent to you. By subscribing to Habeas, you have X-Habeas headers put into your email. You can filter based on these to help prevent more spam and know the email is legit.
Check it out. I don't use it personally, one of the mail lists I'm on uses it.

Re:Look into Habeas

[eaolson]

habeas is a way to help prevent spam sent to you.

No, this doesn't prevent spam. This automates hitting the delete key. The spam is still sent, processed, received, but hidden from your view at the last possible moment.

I'm not saying filtering doesn't have it's place, but it's a stopgap measure that treats only the symptoms, while the disease rages on.

Re:Look into Habeas

[Lynn Benfield]

Although the intent behind Habeas isn't really to automate filtering, it's to allow legal action to be taken against spammers.

The headers they append are fragments of a copyrighted/trademarked poem or somesuch: the idea is that eventually enough people will filter based on this that a spammer will "illegally" append them as well.

Remains to be seen how effective it will actually be - I suspect not very, since spammers will only need to bother appending the Habeas marker if 99% of legit mail includes it. Since Habeas charge money to include their mark in business email, most mail will never include it - so spammers will never need to bother.

Re:Look into Habeas

[Slashed Otter]

Maybe I'm not getting something here, but how does this prevent a SPAMer from adding his own X-Habeas header? I'm a little unclear as to how adding a header to an email can be simple enough that I can explain it to my mother, but too complex for a SPAMer to figure out. It would seem that once everyone has adopted this filtering scheme, we'll start to see SPAM with the X-Habeas headers.

Re:Look into Habeas

[DuckWing]

ok, granted. You'd still get spam, but at least you'd be prevented from seeing it.

Are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I honestly do not believe you when you say that you have got 207 spams today already. My email address is all over the internet on webpages and in software download readme files and as headers in source code, without any kind of protection. I have been using the same address for 3 years. I am not at all careful about who I give it to, and I use no filtering software.

At most I receive three a day - sometimes as many as (gosh!) five or six.

Re:Are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so you also:

* Post it in some form on your webpage,
* Include it as a "reply to" on various message boards
* Use it as a "reply to" in usenet newsgroups
* Sign up for lots of online vendors using it (Amazon, CDNow, Thinkgeek)?

Kudos! You, my friend, must have the magic touch!

Re:Are you sure?

[Patrick May]

I have an email address that I've been using for nearly 10 years. It has been on websites and Usenet posts. I can easily believe that someone could get over 200 spam per day because it has happened to me.

Today is a good day: only about 40 so far.

Bad Idea

[Ravenscall]

And this is why. Assuming you have the computer, phone line and small monthly fee(depending on service) Email a an effective and free form of coomunications. In effect, you are already paying for it, when you pay for your monthly service. Adding a fee for E-mail would in effect be an "E-Mail tax", but instead of going to public works or anything like that, it goes to line the pockets of the sellers of the E-stamps.

Case in point, bad idea.

Re:Bad Idea

[ajs]

You're absolutely right, and here's how you convince the lay-person. Don't allow for the physical mail metaphor (there's a reason people use email FAR more than they ever used physical mail). Instead use this one:

Imagine a world were everyone walked around with sound-proof ear muffs and charged you a penny for them to listen to what you have to say. Would you ever know what was going on? Worse, imagine a world where only certain people did this? Would those people or the people who didn't have ear-muffs be hired for jobs, be promoted, meet new friends, etc.

Re:Bad Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

"Adding a fee for E-mail would in effect be an "E-Mail tax", but instead of going to public works or anything like that, it goes to line the pockets of the sellers of the E-stamps."

Couldn't the same argument then be made against Slashdot's subscription service?

Re:Bad Idea

[Alsee]

You are completely wrong and whoever modded you up needs to get thwapped with a halibut. It is an excellent solution to the spam poblem. It is not an E-mail tax. It does not go to line the pockets of stamp sellers. RTFA! RTFA! RTFA!

-

Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny how the hell-bent libertarians on Slashdot become whining pro-state-control freaks when it comes to spam.

Face it. They might not like the way the spammers conduct their business, but fundamentally they're like any other business.

Re:Funny

[Shalda]

Actually, what we want to do is post an acceptable use policy on our mail servers and have that be legally enforceable. Right now, I'm trying to convince my local district attorney to file obscenetiy charges against porn-spammers. It's not free speech when it intrudes on my privacy.

Re:Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Intrudes on your privacy how? Does their email contain a virus that hijacks your webcam and takes a picture of your nob? Didn't think so.

Cool and all but...

[Bush_man10]

Why should we waste so much time and money to stop something only a few people are doing. If you ask me they should just outlaw spam on a global scale and then throw spammers in jail. It's great so see such innovation in this field but is it really where we should be putting all of our resources to? Would it be more productive to loby the government to outlaw spam? Well of course that would make sense and it would destroy the need for all these anti-spam solutions. They don't want there own products to be worth nothing. There is money to be made off creating and stoping spam :)

Nice to see an implementation

[cultobill]

Lots of people have talked about this sort of system (pay $.01 per email you send, receive the same per email you get), but it's good to see someone writing it finally.

A question remains: my Social Implications teacher also teaches Telecommunications Law. She maintains that this sort of thing will open a floodgate of per-use fees on our internet access that we won't want.

I guess that by having a third party do it (instead of the ISP), we can get around that problem for now. Does anyone have any idea if she's right, and if so if it could affect this as well?

Re:Nice to see an implementation

[kasperd]

receive the same per email you get

While that would be a good idea, it is not what is described by the article. Of course people are going to whine if they have to pay for this, and in particular if they have to pay for each mail they send. If implementing this would require the price of an internet conneciton to be increased by $1 per month, I'd be happy to pay. However the ISPs must understand, that they are not supposed to make money from each mail. The money are supposed to be payed to the recipient, who can then use them when writing emails himself. The case where you are exchanging emails with your friends should only require payment for the first few emails until you have witelisted each other. Once both parties have witelisted the other party, any payment already made should be returned. If implemented correctly, you are going to pay the first time you mail a person, and you get the money back once he replies. And whenever you get a spam mail you get an amount of money, you just must not reply to the spam. In some cases it would make sense for Alice to pay Bob for each email, while Bob does not pay back. That would make sense if the communication is done because Alice wants Bobs help for some problem. It would be Alice that had started the communication and choose to pay because she believe Bobs answer is worth much more than the payment.

Re:Nice to see an implementation

[Reziac]

I think your teacher is correct. The next logical step would be pay-per-read (or pay-per-send, depending on who gets dinged under whichever scheme goes into use) for usenet articles (after all, there's spam on usenet too). After that, it's a short step to pay per view for web pages (hmm.. does that mean per page, or per http request? if the latter, imagine the proliferation of web bugs!!)

And as I point out above, even a penny per email gets damned expensive in a hurry if you really USE email as your major daily communication route. As sender or recipient, at $0.01 cent each, just my *legit* email would cost me around $180/year. That's almost as much as I pay for my ISP.

Re:Nice to see an implementation

[Drakonian]

receive the same per email you get

Linux Kernel Mailing List here I come! Free money!

Worst than that

[unknown omega]

I recieved my first spam email today ... on my cellphone!!!! That costed me 5 cents.

Re:Worst than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I got one of those and am actually surprised I haven't seen more of it. :( I think mine was from BeachParty.com or something silly like that.

[rant]But what really bugs me is that GNC got my cell phone number, and they call me every month with a RECORDED message telling me about their sales.[/rant]

Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited email.

[Nonesuch]

You've got it backwards.

If you read the article, the idea is to whitelist your friends and mailing lists, and then you personally choose to set a fee that you charge for accepting mail from any person/business unknown to you.

So basically, you get paid for receiving email, but you only need to pay if you are in the habit of sending unsolicited email to random strangers.

Not necessarily pay

[Vollernurd]

OK, a lame suggestion full of holes, but...

Your ISP could foot the bill for the "estamps" and each email you send could get marked in this way making the message "legitimate" going through their email servers.

Though the spammers themselves could easily get around this. Unless, however, every ISP clubbed together to create a list of legit stamp-issuers and not allow anything unstamped to pass through. their relays.

Though this is just filtering based on an email field that does not exist.

MS would probably hijack it and bastardise it anyway :-(

Just me thinking out loud.

Re:Not necessarily pay

[grrliegeek]

Tha main reason this suggestion is likely to fail is that it relies on ISP's all doing something. One of the current main contributors to the spam problem is that so many servers around the world are open relays and either don't know or don't care enough to fix the problem. And the ISP that hosts their connection to the Net may not care that they are abusing someone else's server since the ISP's resources aren't being abused directly.

Currently, M. Spammer_Slime has hir spam proggy get their mail ready to send, logs into some open proxy server like proxy.whodunnit.ip.jp in japan, and uses that server to send their million spam messages. They don't care that they are not "supposed" to use proxy.whodunnit.ip.jp, that they are not authorized to use this server, they obviously don't care about stealing other peoples' bandwidth & resources. (See how concerned they are for your penis and/or breasts? How considerate).

Add to this the lack of concern that others have mentioned on the part of some ISP's. I have personal experience with Yahoo, Cox, and AT&T. All of them have shown extreme reluctance to make basic, minor checking into an account that was / is being used in a denial-by-proxy attack, where one of their L-users abused open proxies and caused hundreds of spam messages to be sent to targeted e-mail addresses. They either said there was no violation of their TOS, or that a subpeona was needed or both. Do you really think that these uncaring companies are going to voluntarily participate in a plan like this?

So even if your ISP and mine both subscribed to your plan, the clueless admin of proxy.whodunnit.ip.jp would not know or care enough to participate. If they were hosted by one of the above companies, their ISP would not care that they are stealing the resources of that proxy server or that you are being spammed. And M. Spammer_Slime would continue to spam us both unhindered. Any technical solution needs to be built-in, preferably in the mail system. Any system that relies alone on being implemented by server admins will fail.

Great...

[mschoolbus]

I am sorry sir, you need to use to E-stamps, that email is over 30k in size...

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

uh... s/to/two

my bad.

There is a way to make this work

[puppetluva]

The only way to make this work would be to make the person buy the stamp from the mail receiver. Maybe a middleman would take a little cut, but I wouldn't mind getting a penny or more for receiving each email. I pay for the bandwidth anyway. . . its not like its free for me to get the mail (unless it is at work where the corporation should get the money since they fund the system)

Not only would it cut down on SPAM, people would think through their emails before writing as many flames and time-robbers.

Re:There is a way to make this work

[Reziac]

I get on average about 50 *legit* emails per day. At a penny apiece, that's $15/month ($180/year) just to read my own email.

As to the inverse -- I send a similar volume of *legit* email -- which means if the *sender* was dinged a penny apiece, I'd still be paying the same amount. And I've got around 200 people on my personal mailing list -- so that's a couple more bucks every time I send something. Gods help those that have suscriber lists in 6 figures!!

I've noticed that "pay per send" or "pay per receive" ideas tend to come from people who either have money to burn, or don't actually USE email as their major communication route.

Re:There is a way to make this work

[benja]

The only way to make this work would be to make the person buy the stamp from the mail receiver. Maybe a middleman would take a little cut, but I wouldn't mind getting a penny or more for receiving each email.

Mailing lists into pyramid schemes!

Not a chance

[franimal]

Personally, I won't pay three cents to send an email.

1. I don't want to deal with the headache and I don't think anyone else does either. I suspect that it wold be more difficult to make this a reality than deleting a few spams.
2. Why bother when spam filtering is getting so good? I've been using Spambayes on a trial basis for a while now and it's been very good to me.
3. I can send it for free now; why pay? Plus, I don't want to see three cents rise to something nutty like $0.38.

Re:Not a chance

[ComputerSlicer23]

While I agree with you in princepal. Filtering spam after it's sent, means that your ISP's are processing more e-mail, need more bandwidth, and need more disk space to spool e-mail. That cost will be passed onto you the consumer. So paying the 3 cents means that the person generating the cost is paying, rather then having it amortized over the internet community.

I knew several people who used to say deleting spam isn't that hard, 5 years ago. After having the same e-mail address for 7-8 years, they can't empty out e-mail often enough to get rid of the spam on machines with 10Mbyte quotas for e-mail. At last count, they got 3-4 hundred a day.

Filtering spam leads to the possiblity of false positives, which is bad. The extra bonus is that, you don't have to pay 3 cents to send e-mail, but your mail will get rejected if the receiver expects 3 cents to read it.

I believe that in the end, the best solution is one that involves keyrings, and verifiable e-mails. I'll happily receive e-mail from anyone who attaches a PGP digest. I can build up a ring of people whom I trust to identify spams, and spam e-mails. If they register that key as a spam sender, my mail reader will filter it for me automatically, and my server will reject the e-mail when it sees the sees the key is that of a known spammer.

The cost of generating new keys, and the distributed process of identifing known spammers will solve the problem pretty easily. The hard part is being the first guy to transition to it. It'd be even harder then transitioning to IPv6. Which means it'll never happen.

Kirby

Re:Not a chance

[franimal]

Interesting. I host my own email.

If I didn't, I'd expect that storage cost and transmission costs would be covered by a flat rate for my email services. Those costs are relatively cheap and they are included in the base cost. SPAM is successful because it's so cheap to send millions of messages. Saying that ISPs need to be compensated for the costs of transmitting and storing SPAM by charging the people that send HAM (not SPAM) is just backwards. What happens when SPAMers hack into the system? Then you have SPAMers sending SPAM for free and the peon spending three cents for nothing.

Re: I'd love to see something done

[Anonymous Coward]

You are talking about a guy who required 21 attempts to get XP on his computer.

Supplying XP with his time zone was too complicated for Malda. You expect him to set up email filters?

it wouldnt work

[Neophytus]

A payment for email would be cracked or bypassed within a week, and social engineering could be use to get other unfortunate users to foot the cost for those who cannt work it out.

Re:it wouldnt work

[tomhudson]

Then there's also the whole question of accessability across the economic "digital divide".

Re:it wouldnt work

[bill_mcgonigle]

Right, none of these solutions are going to be enforcable unless the exchange is covered by contract law.

daft

[Anonymous Coward]

1) people would just create open email protcols to bypass any such system
2) countries outside the US would ignore the system, except perhaps poodle Australia
3) all email would then truly be government monitored

Wont' work

[spacefight]

Quote from the pdf:
"When a message arrives at my machine or mail-server, it is examined. If the sender is on my accept list, the message is passed through to my in-box."

spammers do this with forged email addressess all the time... and pass trough whitelists all the time as well.

Yes this is a great idea

[wondafucka]

After this we can tax people who breathe, because I am sick of hearing opinions that I don't agree with. If someone wants to tell me something I am not interested in hearing, they must interact with my token agent and pay me a fee. If they don't pay the fee, then they will have to stop breathing. (Bush would be dead in seconds)

my personal spam solutions

[jjv411]

I don't have a solution to spam, but there are a few things I do that make me feel so much better when I get it.

I own my own domain name so any email address at my domain gets to me. So when I register for stuff, I use unique email addresses every time (i.e. amazon@mydomain.com, circuitcity@mydomain.com). So if anyone SELLS my email address, I know because I start getting spam at a particular address. So anyways... here are my two simple solutions:

1. For every piece of spam that I get, I send a 5 copies back to the mail relay that sent me the mail. If they are going to annoy me, at least I will chew up some of their bandwidth and CPU cycles.

2. And if someone "sold" my address, then I also send 5 copies of the spam to the rat-bastard seller. I hope to chew up their resources as well.

If EVERYONE did this, I think it would totally crash the offenders machines and clog up their big fat internet pipes.

Re:my personal spam solutions

[newt_sd]

Well doesn't this just prove any idiot can get a domain name maybe thats the real problem with the internet :)

Re:my personal spam solutions

[John Zebedee]

ISTM that this only compounds the problem, not cures it. The goal is to maximise the signal to noise ratio on the Net, so multiplying the noise by 5 seems an ineffective way of getting there. Surely you would do better by creating a form letter demanding to be removed from the spam list, reporting the abusers to postmasters, and so forth.

Re:my personal spam solutions

[Anonymous Coward]

Similarly, you can use the postage-paid envelopes you get in credit card apps, etc, to return junk mail back to sender, at their expense. :)

Re:my personal spam solutions

[Sanga]

Hmmmm ....

1) Buy a domain
2) administer it as well as jjv411 does.
3) stop spam.

This is not a solution for Everyone ...

Would you get better results by reporting the sellers to some consumer rights groups rather than chewing them back?

Re:my personal spam solutions

[Alsee]

multiplying the noise by 5 seems an ineffective way of getting there.

He isn't increasing the general noise level, it is all directed at those who are causing the spam problems.

-

Re:my personal spam solutions

[John Zebedee]

Well, USTM that if input to his mail(server/box) is X spam, and he puts out 5X spam, then not only is he increasing the noise level, but he's executing a loud SSF instruction at the same time: the only one he punishes to any noticable extent is himself.

Computer charges

[ephemeraleuphoria]

I would never support an e-stamp for sending e-mail. What about the guy who goes down to the library once a week to e-mail his relatives? Are you telling me he has to pay something, even if it's only a couple pennies, to use this feature? He'd still have to send those pennies somewhere. Personally, I like *gasp* Microsoft's idea better. (see previous Slashdot post that I can't seem to find right now). Charging computer cycles, while wasting some processing power, would not hurt any user sending a reasonably limited amount of spam. But it would make it impossible to flood1,000 "Free pr0n! No Credit Card Required!" messages to inboxes in less than an hour. Pardon the cliche, but keep the Internet free.

Re:Computer charges

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez, they're talking about MASS mailings, not emailing your relatives... Didn't you even read the article? No, why do that, huh...?

Computational Cost

[vurtigo]

Such schemes can work even if nobody collects the costs of the stamp. For example, it can be the computational cost of finding a collision in a cryptographic hash function (where one of the inputs is the message+sender+recipient).

Re:Computational Cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor published a paper with this idea back in 1992. See http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/pvp. ps.

I have my doubts given the cost of new computing power today, but it is worth some thought. Relatively speaking it is also not difficult to implement.

It seems to me like you could do something like h(message including destination) = h(payment header) where h is something like a 20 bit hash function. In their paper they suggest a more complicated technique, I don't recall why.

what about mailing lists ?

[selderrr]

many developers depend on them. I hardly ever send mail to such lists, but read all of them. Not really fair if they'd have to pay for sending me valuable information.

It's so silly to see so many complex anti spam solutions, if all we need is jurisdiction aruond the concept. The biggest issue with spam is that tere's no law forbidding it. Fix that, and trigger happy lawyers will take care of the problem.

Re:what about mailing lists ?

[agby]

... which is why, as the article suggests, you whitelist the mailing lists.

Re:what about mailing lists ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems strange that we advocate a legal solution while at the same time (in other articles) complaining about other legal solutions that affect our "freedoms" to steal from others.

Oh well, I guess consistency isn't required :-(

Re:what about mailing lists ?

[BenV666]

but read all of them

Man, where do you get that amount of time? That's a huge amount of mail :)

Re:what about mailing lists ?

[Sanga]

Couldn't you add the mailing list sender to your whitelist? Only people not in your addressbook will be charged to send you email.

Re:what about mailing lists ?

[cra]

I for one don't think passing laws will solve the problem. First of all there would be different laws in different countries, and even in different states for you people living in larger countries. How would people know what country others live in? Not that I think spammers deserve to get off the hook because of that, but what if I send an e-mail to someone I think I know, and it gets to someone else with a similar name? Would I get sued for that? I guess I could, but probably wouldn't.

Another point is that it would be difficult to win such cases, and I think the courts should spend time convicting real criminals, like violent people and such.

In Norway, we have recently gotten a few new laws that serve no purpose other than undermining peoples faith in the legal system. Like what use is a law against talking in handheld phones while driving, if there is nobody to catch the "criminals" that still do?

And how would you feel if the person that beat your cousin almost to death and scarred him for life gets off the hook due to lask of resources in the police, while they just yesterday fined you $150 for talking in the phone while driving?

Why not?

[Rooked_One]

I mean really? This could be a huge tax break in a way. Charge anyone who bases their spam ops in the US, or whatever country really, a flat tax on each spam they send. Of course there would have to be a judge and jury about this *cough*/.*cough* but i'm sure the populous would be able to decern what was spam and what isn't.

And then that moves me to overseas operation spam. Well, there should be some online despository for ISP admins to get together on, corolate on who is sending what spam from where - IF they are american in origin, and have just moved to china for the pure spam operation, tax them in whatever way you see fit.

something doesn't sound right

[LinuxXPHybrid]

Well, you don't have to pay when you email your friends, colleagues, etc. people that you know (if you read the article). Hmmm... apparently, not many people have actually read the article. You really don't have to pay money unless you are sending out unsolicited emails.

But I still don't think that this is a great idea. That's my hunch. Email wasn't designed to pay for it under any circumstance including, what you know today, spam. Once any email becomes non-free, free as free beer, it really changes the way in which email is used today. Sounds like a good idea to me generally, but ... something doesn't sound right.

Re:something doesn't sound right

[Anonymous Coward]

The real issue is that you are providing an infrastructure to charge people for every email they send. Not a good idea.

Re:something doesn't sound right

[TrentTheThief]

I read it.

The main problems are in collection and identification. The RECIPIENT is expected to maintain a whitelist of "good email" addresses. So, then I am expected to enter the the address book for my entire company, including their personal address? New addresses from friends on the road using a throwaway yahoo address?

Not to mention the administration aspects for ISPs. Or how anyone could enforce this on the world. Spam works because it can be sent by the bazillion; good addresses or bad addresses. It's all the same to them. If your address bouces, they don't know. they don't much care, either. From casual observation of my email server logs, I still receive plenty of spam to addresses and aliases I killed off years ago. Years!

I get email for addresses that never existed on my system. Some of those have been coming for at least five years.

The idea is well-intentioned, but ludicrous. It would be impossible to implement. This will become another urban legend in time, just as that old chectnut about the US Postal Service charging for modem use or for sending an email.

FARKer #459.

Re:something doesn't sound right

[andrew_0812]

Yeah, imagine if said infrastructure falls into the wrong hands... Say a greedy ISP (if such a thing really exists, I have read reports, but nothing concrete). Next thing you know we will have ISPs giving you 20 free emails a month and each additional one costs a nickle or something.


I agree, not a good idea.

Re:something doesn't sound right

[linuxelf]

>You really don't have to pay money unless you are sending out unsolicited emails.

When was the last time you received Spam where the spammer says "I know this is unsolicited, but hey, check this out?" All the spam I get says "We're sending you this because you asked for it." or "Re: Your inquiry about penile implants"

Re:something doesn't sound right

[buffer-overflowed]

The post office wanted to start charging for email a while back. Personally, I like the pay for non-whitelisted email, with revenues collected by the US Post Office and distributed to the involved ISPs with the Post Office collecting an administration fee. They could charge $.50, $1.00, whatever they want really, if the recipient wants, they can "reverse the charges", if not, the spammer or unsolicited emailer pays out of pocket a large sum.

Mainly because they have the legal muscle to back it up. I'm sure most people would disagree with me.

Re:something doesn't sound right

[AnotherBlackHat]

The idea is well-intentioned, but ludicrous. It would be impossible to implement. This will become another urban legend in time, just as that old chectnut about the US Postal Service charging for modem use or for sending an email.

Bad to impliment perhaps, but not impossible.
I already implement something very similar with spamwolf.
I could probably hack out an implementation in a week if I wanted to.

It's easy enough for the recipient to maintain a white list if it doesn't have to be complete,
and your friends probably wouldn't mind spending a few cents once to email you.
The real problem as I see it is big impersonal companies that send important email.
Network Solutions isn't likely to spend even a few cents to notify you that your password is being changed,
or provide a valid return address that's read by a human, but that's one message you really want to receive.

-- this is not a .sig

Re:something doesn't sound right

[Rayston]

"The post office wanted to start charging for email a while back."

Are you talking about this Hoax? :

http://www.snopes.com/business/taxes/602p.htm

I have never seen any reliable info that the Post Office ever seriously considered charging for email.

Thanx

Rayston

Re:something doesn't sound right

[Anonymous Coward]

wouldn't work anyway. people have to pay to send you ad's in your mail box and they just happily do so. then write the cost off on their taxes. if anything, it'll just encourage spammers because they can write off any e-stamp costs as business expenses which just might add profit to their bottom line if done right.

Re:something doesn't sound right

[some guy I know]

So, then I am expected to enter the the address book for my entire company, including their personal address?

Have you never heard of wildcards?

New addresses from friends on the road using a throwaway yahoo address?

The article refers to a ten-digit number embedded within the message.
Your friend would have to simply add this code to the message sent.
How would your friend remember this number?
He/she would have it written down on the same scrap of paper on which your email address is written (or PDA on which it is stored).

Slashdot's spam load is not typical

[stratjakt]

Show of hands.

How many people give out cmdrtaco@slashdot.org or similar as their email address when registering for a website or whatnot?

We've gotten maybe 50 spams company wide all year so far.

Charging for email wont end spam. It'll end email. Why bother? If I'm paying for a service, I'll use a more reliable and secure one.

Re:Slashdot's spam load is not typical

[stratjakt]

Why mod that down? It's a valid point.

Slashdot gets a ton of spam because they're a high profile target. They get it for the same reason they get "in soviet russia" jokes, Old Ike stories, and goatse links.

My company is undeniably low profile. The only people who know our domain exists are our clients, save perhaps the one in a million mistyped url.

We get virtually no spam. The spam we do get is because of one of the perverts in marketing who keeps signing up for "hot porn daily in your email" lists.

Personal Stamps

[RichMan]

How about a protocol for personal PGP stamps.

I can issue stamps with as many tags as I like and configure my email front end to deal with messages based on the stamps
"Friends"
"I am a customer of company X"
"I work for A and buy from B"
"I work for A and sell to C"
"Registered at site M to enter contest"
"Tech web site registration"
"News web site registration"
"Entertainment web site registration"

In the event you went on holiday you could even set up forwarding based on the message stamps.

Re:Personal Stamps

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a protocol for personal PGP stamps.

How about realizing that a) most computer users don't know how to use Outlook Express and b) public key cryptography is so cumbersome to use that even computer literate people don't like using it. Heck, that's why most people are still sending their e-mail unencrypted.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[Randolpho]

If you read the article, the idea is to whitelist your friends and mailing lists, and then you personally choose to set a fee that you charge for accepting mail from any person/business unknown to you.

So basically, you get paid for receiving email, but you only need to pay if you are in the habit of sending unsolicited email to random strangers.

If that's really the case, then I'm all for it! Hell, I'll gladly accept every piece of spam the send, as long as they send me some cash for it as well!

Collective spam filter

[192939495969798999]

Maybe there should be a collective spam filter applied to the whole internet somehow. If possible, it would "eat" spams before they ever got to anyone, and the more you block, the less everyone gets.

Re:Collective spam filter

[PigleT]

There are several already.

The RBLs were an initial attempt to do so, but only prove about 60% accurate these days (at least from what I see - I've given up on the idea now).

Then you've got Razor2 and Pyzor, and the DCC to be investigating.

After you ;)

Just like....

[Jaysyn]

... a regular stamp, it's fee starts out tiny, and is then increased little by little. See the boiled frog theory.

Jaysyn

What about automated emails?

[zapp]

I have previously worked at an ISP, and now in a software development organization, and it has always been common practice to send automated emails from webpages or servers.

How would a pay-per-email fee affect people like this? What about the "Forgot Your Password?" links on sites that email your registered email?

I think something like this would hit the Internet a lot harder than people think, since most people just seem to be concerned with Joe User at home sending 50 joke mails a day.

Re:What about automated emails?

[MadKeithV]

Indeed!

Imagine the damage you could do by distributing a worm that causes millions of "send me my password" e-mails at any business site? You might even bring a business to its knees that way.

E-Stamps is Teh Stupid.

It won't work

[Phleg]

Can you imagine the overhead for people who run mailing lists? They've got hundreds of emails a day to thousands of recipients. Even if the cost were a fraction of a cent, the list admin would be swamped.

Not one penny for e-Stamps

[andycox]

Spammers steal bandwidth now by using offshore misconfigured mail servers and relays. They hide the origin of their spammage. They claim to comply with bills which were never passed into law. They lie about removal lists and how their spew is "double opt-in".

If they can spew for free, why would they sudddenly turn "honest" and start paying for the bandwidth they use? What's to stop them from continuing to use the broken servers they are using now?

I am opposed to any measures which might connote any legitimacy to spam.

Re:Not one penny for e-Stamps

[Anonymous Coward]

Spammers steal bandwidth now by using offshore misconfigured mail servers and relays.

From where I'm sitting, "offshore" refers to the US - I get little spam from the Asian and European domains.

A system that I've thought of a while back.

[Demon-Xanth]

Every time you send an email, you pay the recipient $0.01.

End result?
The average email user breaks even if they send as much as they recieve. Someone who sends much more than they recieve is only out $1. Legitimate buisnesses will only pay about $0.05 per sale on average. Still peanuts. However, a spammer that sends out 10,000,000 emails ends up having to fork out $100,000. Still alot cheaper than snailmail spam, but you KNOW they'll be checking thier lists alot more carefully and targeting a bit more precisly than the sun. When that 1 in 10,000==success plan starts running $100/success. It cuts into the profit margin. They'll want to reduce that to a 1 in 1000 for the higher return spams (which are probably 1 in 100,000 or more anyways).

If you really wanted to make money by doing nothing each day, with that setup it'd be possible just by recieving the spam :)

Re:A system that I've thought of a while back.

[TheRaven64]

So what happens if I send an email to a mailing list that's subscribed to by 1000 people (as I often do)? I have to pay $10? Nice. Maybe I should lust subscribe to every mailing list under the sun and retire on the proceeds. Most non-spam email is more valuable to the receiver than the sender (that's what communication's all about), so why should the sender pay?

Re:A system that I've thought of a while back.

[anon*127.0.0.1]

I can see a couple or problems with this plan. First of all, how would you collect? You'd need some sort of account so that the sender could transfer the penny over. They'd need a secure way to send it. I've got a feeling administration and transactional costs would make the price per EMail much higher then a penny.

Secondly, the system would be abused. People would set up email drops and subscribe them to every mailing list and joke list out there. They'd never read the emails, just delete them and collect the cash. 10 addresss receiving 100 emails a day would earn $300 a month. Legitimiate mass Emailers would have to start charging.

Re:A system that I've thought of a while back.

[Anonymous Coward]

But that will increase the cost for me to learn how to get rich quick. I mean now they will tell me their secrets for 50 dollars. But if we start charging em its gonna probably cost me 200 dollars to learn how to get rich.

You bastards want to cost me more money /grrrr

Re:A system that I've thought of a while back.

[Easy2RememberNick]

Hey it sounded good, but it needs more work.
Maybe you could specify to your ISP between two types of e-mail accounts, the normal/open or the credit/debit type.

Robert Cringely also said something similar

[DeepDarkSky]

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030313. html

Though I have to say, neither one are originators of the idea - I've seen it plenty of times before, but this IBM guy is closer to the implementation of a system.

logistical nightmare

[asv108]

There is simply no way to feasibly convert the existing e-mail system to a e-stamp system. The technology is there to create a system, but implementing would be nearly impossible.

Re:logistical nightmare

[TheGratefulNet]

pretty sweeping statement. care to back that up with some facts? or even non-rhetoric?

Re:logistical nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

Logistical Nightmare?

Sounds like scare tactics... All you need is a couple of good developers my friend, and a great plan.

It has been done with Pop mail that is hosted by a outside vendor (that most folks can get), and it is much easier to do it with in house servers.

http://www.brainclone.com/email.htm

Anthony Loera

Re:logistical nightmare

[JoseMonkey]

I'm glad someone finally brought this up. I tend to agree with this. I think it partially depends on where the new logic to check stamps is implemented. I figure it's got to be either the SMTP server of the POP/IMAP server, or both.

If we assume that such a scheme would require such servers to start processing some e-commerce transaction as part of it's service, we're talking about upgrading thousands of servers and changing the protocols.

Furthermore, it seems like you'd probably need to secure this traffic -- otherwise there might be the possibility of stamps getting sniffed and reused.

Like I said, this sounds hard. Why change entire protocols to combat the rogue actions of a few?

Is this email to grandma really worth $0.01?

[travdaddy]

The only way people would even consider this plan is to market it like cell phones, where the first x minutes are free, and each additional minute costs $y. For instance, your first 100 emails are free, but each additional email costs five cents. No one can do much spam damage with only 100 free emails.

But, even then, I'm not convinced customers would embrace this or any other "e-stamp solution."

Microsoft's Penny Black Project

[truthsearch]

That's the supposed goal of Microsoft's Penny Black Project which had a story earlier on /. The idea is to require a small amount of money for each e-mail sent. I don't think I want this to be a requirement that Microsoft implements.

Re:Microsoft's Penny Black Project

[gbjbaanb]

if you read the link, they are investigating different ways of charging the sender - only 1 is by cash, the only one written about on the site is to use CPU cycles, with the algorithm they'd use.

Frankly, I don't care if MS made my mail program go slower - if they embedded it in OE and switched it on by default, then it'd be a very good thing.

I just got spammed by Saddam Hussein!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what to make of this email that appeared in my hotmail account this morning:

From : Saddam
Reply-To : Saddam
To : xxxxxxx@hotmail.com

Subject : We have every intention of getting you laid

Date : Fri, 14 Mar 2003 18:00:00 -0500

Only one Sex Club makes sure its members get laid - IraqiDate. This site is run by Iraqi women who want to fuck, so we're happy to help you find girls who are ready and willing to put out for you. Our goal is to make sure all of us have great sex whenever we want it. Take a look at what our members are like.

More Then 100,000 Registerd Women

64% are married and involved women
94% are looking for an anonymous sex partner
36% are looking for anal sex
65% are looking for oral sex
12% are looking for "taboo" sex
21% are looking for 3-some experience
26% are looking for an older man

100% Horny, 100% Amateur, 100% Real, 100% Ready to fuck tonight!

We have every intention of getting you laid. Our Iraqi female members are motivated by their own sexual needs. They want to fuck and they want to do it now.

Your enemies by day... Your sexual fuck slaves by night.

Re:I just got spammed by Saddam Hussein!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Young Iranian immigrant women actually are rather sexy.

Too bad their brothers and fathers will slit your (and hers) throat if you try anything.

prior article...

[buckthorn]

There was an article some time ago about a white paper someone at IBM (I believe) had written about a system wherein the recipient had the option to charge the sender of an email. The sender was informed whenever an email delivery was attempted that the recipient could charge the sender for the email. It was up to the recipient to do so, therefore your friends could send you email and you wouldn't charge them, unless your subscription to hotcollegecoeds.com was running out. Spammers, though, you'd charge. The application was put over to telemarketing too... the caller heard the blurb about the charge and had to press a tone to accept. Again, you could bless phone numbers the same way you could bless email addresses to avoid the system. But it didn't categorically block everyone you didn't have listed, just informed them of the possible charges. Wish I could remember the link but it's back in the archives somewhere. I loved the idea, myself.

Balancing act?

[DChristensen]

As the typical slashdotter, I have not read this article, however it did give me some thoughts about a system.

Now, this system would only work if there were to be viable micropayments. Assume this is the case.

Any email sent results in a fee. Make it high, even a quarter. The money for the email goes to the recipient. If the recipient responds to the email, the money gets returned to the original sender.

For a typical user of email, (ie, not a spammer) you will in general have a balanced account. For a typical email conversation, you send messages back and forth; thus, the last person to respond would generally be the original recipient (for a zero-sum balance), or the original sender (one credit difference). We will suppose that over time, the typical user would initiate and receive equal numbers of email conversations. Thus the one-credit difference would tend to average out, leaving a zero-sum total for typical email use.

In the case of the spammer, it (not he) is sending out vast more numbers of emails than he is getting responses to (even including flames and the like). His cost will be:

(# spams - # replies) * cost per email.

For cost per email of about a quarter, you get into very unprofitable ranges very quickly. Spamming disappears!

Not to mention, if you wanted to make a few extra bucks, set up some spam honeypots and collect the $$$!

Just my thoughts.

---

Re:Balancing act?

[newt_sd]

Oh My that is a bad idea. Not that I have the solution but wow you really think this would work?

Lets Pay for everything

[aflat362]

Great Idea!

While we're at it, lets charge web servers a penny for every HTML page they serve up. This will dramatically reduce the amount of crappy web pages on the web.

Then we can charge Google for every result they return in their querys. This will reduce the amount of irrelavent pages returned to the user

FUBAR

[Anonymous Coward]

Spammers will get dumping prices and WE will pay in full, right?

Please remove this article it makes me worry about the sanity of this world..

Using CPU Time

[rbolkey]

For any of you that subscribe to MIT's Technology Review, it has a good brief in the current issue about some efforts to use CPU time as a method of thwarting bulk mailers.

To sum up, requiring a cpu intensive calculation to send off email would limit the number of emails that a person could send off per day (a 10 second calculation would limit a spammer to 8k messages per day, but would still be bearable for you and me).

Won't stop the tide, but could help stem it's growth. Would raise the cost for sending spam dramatically. Bulkmail renderfarms anyone?

Re:Using CPU Time

[Reziac]

So then what? Hijack someone's server (or even a home machine) via trojan/backdoor, and let them do the CPU grunt work. This won't be much harder than finding an open relay.

Slashdot Slippery Slope Alert

[The Ape With No Name]

There is no sufficient evidence to assert that the fee will go up only that it might go up. The fallacy of the slippery slope is an art form on Slashdot!

Re:Slashdot Slippery Slope Alert

[Jaysyn]

LOL, fees always go up, it's just a matter of time.

Jaysyn

An old quote that still works...

[dbooster]

Ben Franklin: "Those who would give up a few essential liberties in exchange for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Give up free e-mail for protection from spam (for a while). uhm... how about no. And who here doesn't believe that as soon as we allow them to charge for email it will start increasing the same as snail mail stamps do every year? ugh! -Dave

Filtering

[Mournblade]

I typically receive about 750 spams a week. The combination of SpamAssasin on the mail server and the new Junk Mail controls in Moz. 1.3 have nearly eliminated the amount of junk mail that shows up in my Inbox. No false positives so far, and I haven't had a spam in my inbox in two days.

My Idea first

[Anonymous Coward]

Guys,

This idea has been out there already, and I have a beta site that is working for me at this time using an e-stamp solution.

some posts mentioning the solution:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=559 49&cid=5440 477

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=53993&cid=53 20 743

If IBM (or Large copr X) says it's news though... it's news, otherwise it's not news. So Slashdot folks... we have great ideas, why do we always look at them in a different light when someone in a large company has the same idea?

BTW: the e-stamps in my solution would be paid 80% to the email user, and 20% to the email service or isp.

Hey IBM, (or other large corp) If you would like to license this solution, and have it sone for you, Contact me.

anthony@brainclone.com

That would be the beginning of the end...

[Anonymous Coward]

...reading this I'll start right now to look for alternatives to eMail before the american world gov erment starts to fuck email users..

One big problem

[Reeses]

The only problem I see with this is that the spammers will throw a fit, and this thing will spiral out of control, and EVERYONE will wind up paying for email.

Is that what we really want? How long before the price of email starts to climb due to "increased costs"? Have you bought a stamp for snail mail lately?

We really need to sit down and think this through. There's no way we're going to be able to ride financially on the back of the spammers.

No sir, I don't like it

[osgeek]

By associating a fee with the sending of spam, you're legitimizing the practice, much as junk postal mail is "legitimate".

Don't even begin to open that door, you fools. We must make it illegal to send spam, then from there, make it illegal to send unsolicited postal mail, solicit on your doorstep, and make unsolicited commercial/charity/political telephone calls.

It's my phone, my email inbox, my mailbox, and my doorstep. Fuck off if you think you have a right to use it at will to sell your crap.

Re:No sir, I don't like it

[dan.hunt]

While I agree with charging a fee would legitimize the practice of spam, I stop short of agreeing with you. Where I live, ( Rural Western Canada ) I can demand that the postal office not give me any unsolicited ad mail. The phone company have rules about when you can phone and offer to clean my carpets. I can tell sales people to have a nice day in person or put up a "Your not welcome" sign. I'm not ready to live isolated from the world and I don't want any law that would cause that to happen.

Re:No sir, I don't like it

[DoubleD]

Fine, you do not like unsolicited (e)mail? Use your rights and install software with a whitelist. Dont like unsolicited phone calls, find a technical solution (my brother uses a whitelistlike system). Finally if you feel so threatened by solicitors, MOVE, go find yourself a nice gated community. After all you are a responsible, thinking, and reasoning human being.

Like it or not you are a member of a free society. This calls for certain sacrifices as some people so convieniently forget. You will hear things you do not agree with, you will be confronted by advertising, and you might even have to spend some of your precious time doing so.

Telephones, email, mail, and even your front doorstep are all ways you provide an interface to society around you. Let's work on ways to intelligently limit unwanted communication without blithly passing more laws. Societal pressures, technical measures, and personal patience are the solutions we require to this (spam) and other problems.

Re:No sir, I don't like it

[osgeek]

So now, you're placing the burden on *me*, an innocent citizen, to jump through hoops to avoid having unwanted people use my property, my phone, my email box, etc. as they wish?

Screw that. The onus should be on the solicitors, since they didn't pay for any of the things that I mentioned above... I DID.

Like it or not you are a member of a free society.

That's bullshit. Nothing about being in a free society has to mean that sellers automatically get to use their target market's resources (phones, walkways, email boxes, etc.).

It's like saying, "If you don't want your car to be stolen, don't leave it where someone can jimmy the lock and hot wire it. It's a free country, leave your car locked up in a vault."

Re:No sir, I don't like it

[DoubleD]

Yes, I am placing the burden on you. You are the only person who can define what is "Unwanted". And for the most part that burden is not a large one. For cases that it is, ie excessive amounts of spam, and phone calls I believe that fixes need to be explored. However I do not believe legislation is the way to fix these excesses.

I could be wrong but I would say junk mail is in (for the most part) an acceptable equilibrium. The costs of sending such mailers has to be balenced with the value received. As of now email has no such limit, ie the cost doesnt accuratly track the volume and places an unbalanced burden on the receiver/receiver's provider.

It's like saying, "If you don't want your car to be stolen, don't leave it where someone can jimmy the lock and hot wire it. It's a free country, leave your car locked up in a vault."


It is nothing of the sort. Stealing a car is illegal, and rightly so the victim is deprived of a possetion of value. It is more like saying, "If you do not want to hear that preacher/protestor/political activist on the street corner, go a different way." or, "If you do not want to listen to the Jehova's Witness/Mormon/Political Activist on your doorstep, politly ask/yell/insult them and close/slam the door."

Although I think I understand your frustration, I do not agree with your solution. Poor behaviour, annoyances, etc should not be legistlated against but socialy and economically made unviable.

I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong

[Schlemphfer]

To sum up the article: sending email would still be free, if you're on your recipient's white list. But if you're contacting somebody out of the blue, then you're going to need to have a "charity stamp" -- whether it costs 1/10 of a penny, a penny, or a dime isn't made clear.

This approach means that spammers have to pay for a charity stamp for every single spam they send out. And that would undoubtedly eat into their profits, and prevent the most ineffective spams from being sent.

But here, I think the developer of the idea pushes the logic too far. He says, "The whole spam industry depends on spam being free to the sender," Fahlman says. "If we change the social rules of E-mail just a tiny bit, I think the whole problem of spam goes away."

I think it's far more logical to conclude that the problem won't go away at all. But it might become more manageable, because it will force spammers to only launch campaigns that can return a profit after charity stamp expenses. In essence, spamming will become more like bulk mail. It costs Land's End a dollar a catalog for their postal mailings, and they probably get a 3% response rate, but the profits they make on that clothing is worth continued and highly targeted mailings. The same dynamic may one day be true with spam. And I'd rather get 30 emails a year from reputable companies like Land's End than 3000 emails a year from Viagra pushers.

I've heard a variation of this idea, and I think it might in fact be Fahlman's work, and that the Internet Week article sort of missed the boat on this reporting. In the variation I've heard, the "charity stamp" is expensive, say a couple of dollars. This system would create a social agreement that redeeming a charity stamp is sort of a slap in the face. Your best friend from elementary school could email you, and you'd be perfectly entitled to redeem his charity stamp since he's not on your whitelist. No reasonable person would burn friends and family like this. But what fun it would be to burn spammers this way, having each unwanted email result in a dollar being sent to your favorite charity!

I think this kind of optional redeeming of charity stamps is the core of what would make this idea work. But we'd need to set up a new email/micropayment infrasture to make it possible, and couple it with strict laws that spammers trying to evade the charity stamp face criminal penalties. Creating a new system like this would pose enormous problems, but it sounds workable. I think the bottom line is that the spam problem can almost certainly be reigned in, but whatever approach is used, it's going to take big money, government intervention, and a partial redesign of how email servers currently operate.

As for me, I recently started using the Bayesian filters in Mozilla 1.3's email client. I can't say enough good things about how well this has worked--I've reclaimed my email box. It used to take me ten minutes or more a day to delete spam. But Mozilla does it with uncanny accuracy, and probably with fewer mistakes than I would make if I'm hurrying.

Re:I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong

[Cy Guy]

we'd need to set up a new email/micropayment infrastucture to make it possible

I think the micro payment's issue isn't there. You just buy $5 worth of stamps from the charity or OS project or your choice. You wouldn't have to buy the stamps one at a time.

As far as changing the servers, that too wouldn't be needed since the whole process could be handled on the client side. If PGP for email (and unfortunately webbugs) can be implemented without altering the email servers, then certainly this kind of system could as well.

As for me, I recently started using the Bayesian filters in Mozilla 1.3's email client. I can't say enough good things about how well this has worked--I've reclaimed my email box. It used to take me ten minutes or more a day to delete spam. But Mozilla does it with uncanny accuracy,

Thanks for the tip, I will try it out one of my accounts I have abbandoned due to too much spammage.

Re:I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong

[Surak]

I think this kind of optional redeeming of charity stamps is the core of what would make this idea work. But we'd need to set up a new email/micropayment infrasture to make it possible, and couple it with strict laws that spammers trying to evade the charity stamp face criminal penalties. Creating a new system like this would pose enormous problems, but it sounds workable. I think the bottom line is that the spam problem can almost certainly be reigned in, but whatever approach is used, it's going to take big money, government intervention, and a partial redesign of how email servers currently operate.

Why would this work? Spammers *already* pay significant amounts of money sending spam. A few more cents per transaction isn't going to amount to a hill of beans worth of difference.

Bandwidth, equipment, employee time, none of this is free. What? Do you think most spammers use free AOL accounts? No. Most spammers are like AdVal Message Networks: legitimate companies that have real employees and real equipment to send out real spam. Their costs are real. A few pennies more won't make any difference to AdVal, why should they care? They'll just pass the cost onto their customers. Duh.

Re:I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong

[micromoog]

Spammers *already* pay significant amounts of money sending spam. A few more cents per transaction isn't going to amount to a hill of beans worth of difference.

You're very, very wrong. It's true that a big-time spam operation requires significant funds to operate, but these people send MILLIONS of untargeted messages in a campaign. Adding even a penny charge to each message would make the campaign cost many times what it currently does.

Re:I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

A few pennies more won't make any difference to AdVal, why should they care? They'll just pass the cost onto their customers. Duh.

Wow, didn't pay attention in econ 101, did you? If they "pass it onto their customers", then they've reduced the value their customers see in spamming. If it costs enough -- and a 1 cent per message for, say, 500,000 messages, we're still talking $50,000 -- then the customers will stop sending the spam. Of course, these companies will eventually pass the cost onto the people who respond to spam (and who are they, anyway)? A few people willing to splurge will stop. Indeed, I suspect that the number of responses is a strong function of price, but I haven't seen data for that.

But you've got to recognize a few economic facts here:

Companies who hire spammers are generally operating on razor-thin margins.

Currently, the marginal cost for sending one extra spam message is very close to zero ... probably in the millionth of a cent range. Ironically, this is what drives a spammer to send as many messages as possible.

Raising the marginal rate would make spamming less profitable, which would lead to there being less of it.

Re:I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong

[Surak]

Wow, didn't pay attention in econ 101, did you? If they "pass it onto their customers", then they've reduced the value their customers see in spamming. If it costs enough -- and a 1 cent per message for, say, 500,000 messages, we're still talking $50,000

Wow, you didn't pay attention in 6th grade math class, did you? :-P $0.01 * 500,000 = $5,000, not $50,000. If they're already spending say $0.05 a message, $25,000, then what's another $5000?

Re:I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

So change it to 10 cents .... you've just turned a 25,000 investment into a 75,000. You've trippled the price. I think that would turn people away.

Re:I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong

[CybSirius]

If the cost of a charity stamp is sufficiently small, I think most ISPs would be willing to absorb the cost for the majority of their users much like they do for bandwidth. That is to say that your monthly fee would include X number of sent e-mail messages per month. Spammers using their ISPs mail relays would be billed for the additional usage. If they use their own relays, then they will need to purchase charity stamps for themselves. Not sure about the technical challenges of implementing this but at the rate the spam problem is growing, I think we need to seriously consider every idea.

Re:I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong

[Catamaran]

and couple it with strict laws that spammers trying to evade the charity stamp face criminal penalties.

No, leave it to the email clients to delete unstamped mail.

Re:I Think Internet Week Got it Wrong

[swillden]

Thanks for the tip, I will try it out one of my accounts I have abbandoned due to too much spammage.

It works extremely well, in my experience. Only one cautionary note: what makes it work so well is that it starts with no preconceptions (other than a bias to assume mail is not junk by default) and learns to identify junk mail. This also means that you must train it; at first it won't consider anything to be junk and you have to be a little bit patient.

What's really cool is that it junks "junk", not "spam". In other words, it junks whatever you decide you don't want to see, regardless of whether or not it might fit anyone else's definition of "spam".

There are better solutions

[jdoeii]

The article seems to be a new wrapping for a years-old idea of making the sender pay for each individual message mailed.

The article proposed to maintain a white list of trusted addresses. Anyone not on the white list would have to pay money and (manually) obtain a token allowing to send a message to a mail box. I would say this is too difficult.

I think obtaining a token manually is sufficient for all spam-fighting purposes. If it can be assured that the e-mail was sent to me individually by a human being, then it's worth my effort of looking at the subject line. So, if the sender is not on my white list, my server could reply with an automatic message something like "Your message has not been delivered. Visit the page http://.../?id=123456789, read the number in the image and enter it in the box". That would cut pretty much all spam.

I know at least one free e-mail vendor who implemented this technique. It's simple and easy and still not widely used. I bet the idea from the article would suffer the same fate.

charging for email

[sethaw]

While I think it could work to help stop spam (if a reliable system could be set up), I don't trust companies to not raise the price of each email in the future. Just like with anything else, once somebody finds out that they can make a profit they will raise the prices up and soon email prices will compare with the prices of regular mail.

YOU ARE SO FIRED!

[YOU ARE SO FIRED!]

It's one thing to post on the wrong story, but to post on the wrong story regarding Robo-pornography is just disgusting. Sure, we all think about robots and how they would be the perfect mates from time to time, but not on work time, buddy. Pack it up. You're fired. Be out of this office by 11:40am EST.

What about Mailing lists?

[bookroach]

What about mailing lists like LKM, would they have to pay for each email forwarded?

KarmaBurn - I don't get spam.

[Moderation abuser]

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. You only get spam these days if you want it.

There are a lot of well documented, cross platform and highly effective techniques for avoiding spam.

I won't go into details, because, well, I can't be bothered any more. It's like talking to a brick wall sometimes.

Not quite sure you've grabbed the concept.

[goldcd]

The bulk mail subsidises your 'regular' mail. Your post office runs an infrastructure to let you buy individual bits of gummed paper, tramps around the country individually receiving each bit of mail you've written, tries to decipher the scrawl you've made across the front with the biro and then delivers- all for your 37 cents a pop. The junk mail sender just drops several thousand pre-paid, pre-typeface-addressed identically sized mailshots on their doorstep. They're obviously a lot cheaper to process, but bring up the number of items they handle allowing them to pass on the ability to send a 37c letter to you due to economies of scale.

Re:Not quite sure you've grabbed the concept.

[dschuetz]

The bulk mail subsidises your 'regular' mail.

I see what you're getting at. I suppose it's a valid argument.

I just choose not to believe it. :)

(really, though, even $0.37 is a bargain for what it's doing, compared to the cost to send something FedEx Ground...)

Re:Not quite sure you've grabbed the concept.

[Frater 219]

(really, though, even $0.37 is a bargain for what it's doing, compared to the cost to send something FedEx Ground...)

There are laws forbidding private carriers from getting into the first-class mail business, actually -- and from charging less than the USPS does for certain classes of express mail. The Postal Service is a government-enforced monopoly. The Constitution requires the government to operate post offices -- but it does not require that they be given an otherwise illicit monopoly.

Re:Saddam Hussein -- Dead at 54!

[Anonymous Coward]

Saddam Hussein - Truely an american icon!

Um, pay??

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay to send, or pay to receive? How can you force a fee on either given our open standards on the internet?

Am I the only one tired of hearing Taco whine?

[sedawkgrep]

Spam sucks...yeah we all hate it.

But you know what, if you actually put forth an effort to not splash your e-mail address around, you can avoid enormous amounts of spam before they ever reach you.

I've had one main e-mail address at a major e-mail/web provider for just over four years. I am constantly checking it and I use it for virtually all of my e-mail correspondence.

Right now the spam is the worst it's ever been for me; I get about 12 a day.

sedawkgrep

Yet a better idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Personally and all alone come along a much better idea: Charge only those people sending spam with lots of money! You may complain this is not possible or is nonsense or anything but I don't care as always I have a great idea like this people start to complain! But I'm sure only if technology would allow it, my method would be the best...

Better solution already proposed

[goombah99]

I think a better though analogous solution was already proposed and discussed on slashdot. Basically, to accept or relay any e-mail (not on a whitelist) the sender would have to perform a small numerical calculation of the recipients choice. E.g. find the roots of a sixth order polynomial with 7 coefficients provided by the recipient.

This takes a few millisecond to calculate the answer and its is trivial to check. One could dial up the problem strength as needed.

For normal users this is a trivial cost since my CPU is definitely idle many many milliseconds every time I send an e-mail. But for bulk senders its a problem.

It could be done either by the relaying e-mail servers or as long at the final recipeint. The latter is probably superior as long as forged sender info does dont create accidental DOS attacks.

In any event, it adds a trivial burden to the amount of internet traffic, and given a reduction in spam traffic over time would save on total traffic. And It cost nothing since it uses unexploited resources. And it would I believe kill any centrally served spam dead.

In fact one could actually get useful work out of this.

Imagine this scheme. To get your stamp of approval you have to get a ticket issued from some grid computing server that supplies the mini-tasks. For example, I might sign up with some service that issues mail stamps in return for doing 1 second of calculation on some easily stated but hard to solve problem (prime searching, etc...)

Re:Better solution already proposed

[Mike1024]

Hey,

In fact one could actually get useful work out of this.

Not easily. You either send them a problem that is already solved (pointless, because you won't get any useful work done) or you send them a problem that is unsolved... in which case, you have no way of telling if they are sending the right solution or a spoofed one.

Some places like SETI@HOME have a problem with people submitting fake daya to get thier stats up. The same would happen here.

I suppose You could distribute one work packet to 3 systems simeltaniously, and only send the mail after all 3 systems supplied the same result. But this will only work if a fairly small proportion of mail is spam... which isn't really the case.

There might be some way of getting this to work, but after you factor in data transmission overheads, you'd be better off with pre-solved problems and letting people run distributed computing apps if they want to.

Just my $0.02,

Michael

Re:Better solution already proposed

[Goonie]

Not easily. You either send them a problem that is already solved (pointless, because you won't get any useful work done) or you send them a problem that is unsolved... in which case, you have no way of telling if they are sending the right solution or a spoofed one.

There are lots of problems that are easy to check an answer to, but not easy to solve. In fact, problems that appear to be of this type are one of the most famous open questions in computer science. One easy to understand example is the "Travelling Salesman Problem". You've got a bunch of cities with roads of known lengths between them, and a sales rep who has to visit every one. The question is then "can the salesman travel between them on a route of distance less than x?" If somebody gives you a route, it's very easy to add up the distances to find out its length. However, we don't know of an easy way to *find* that route. There are a bunch of problems like this classed as NP-Complete. They have a very interesting property in that they are all equivalent - if you have a method to solve one efficiently, (in principle) you can use that method to solve them all! Most computer scientists think it highly unlikely that an easy way exists

An even easier example is "this number is a product of two prime numbers. What are they?" Given a solution it's easy to verify its correctness, but finding the solution is very difficult (though, in a theoretical sense, not as difficult as the TSP. The factoring problem is not known to be NP-complete).

just put the bastards in jail for 10 years

[Hao Wu]

So what if it's harsh. If they're low enogh to spam, then they're probably conning old folks in tele-marketing schemes, bank fraud, and everything else you can think of.

Burn idle time, not CPU.

[Chemisor]

At least implement it as a wait period! Pegging the CPU wastes electricity with heat and reduces the processor lifetime. And can you say DOS attack?

I say encript

[dfiguero]

all incoming & outgoing mail and if the mail you receive is not encripted then send it to /dev/null. If someone has to contact you then they can get your key from a website.

So even if spammers got your key they would have to go through the process encrypting the email which is more time consuming and would probably result in less spam sent each day.

But then they could buy more expensive machines and we would end up at square one!

Ah forget what I said!

Use ASK

[cs668]

I started using ASK( Active Spam Killer ).

It works great. It works by requireing a response the first time someone emails you. They repond to an automated email and are whitelisted. Since spam has it's replay lines forged the spammer never replys to the automated email and you don't get any spam.

Since I have started using this 2 months ago I have gotten 2 spam emails. That is down from about 40 a day.

The other bonus is that unlike filters if someone needs to get an email to you they will and it wont accidentally be junked.

Re:Use ASK

[arbitrary nickname]

Interesting idea, but with a major flaw: It would block important automated responses from, for example, online shopping sites...

Re:Use ASK

[limekiller4]

arbitrary nickname writes:
"Interesting idea, but with a major flaw: It would block important automated responses from, for example, online shopping sites..."

Good point, and something to keep in mind when you're engaging in purchasing things online, but it doesn't get blocked outright, merely queued.

http://www.paganini.net/ask/

So once you know where emails will be coming from, you can manually whitelist people, such as anything coming from Amazon or eBay or whatever.

I'm actually going to set this up this weekend. Spam has gotten WAY out of control for me.

saddam==spammers

[sstory]

We should take a lesson from Iraq and shoot 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles at spammers' headquarters.

Before you get your panties in a wad...

[ntr0py]

... about an "email tax", consider this: Microsoft's Penny Black Project aims to do the same thing, but implementation only requires some sort of cost, not necessarily monetary.

One method is especially interesting, the CPU-based scheme in which "the sender must solve a recipient-defined puzzle in which computation of the solution is moderately and provably hard." If that were the case you wouldn't even notice if you're sending one email, but a spammer certainly would if he tries to send out 1,000,000 at a time.

Re:Before you get your panties in a wad...

[julesh]

One method is especially interesting, the CPU-based scheme [microsoft.com] in which "the sender must solve a recipient-defined puzzle in which computation of the solution is moderately and provably hard." If that were the case you wouldn't even notice if you're sending one email, but a spammer certainly would if he tries to send out 1,000,000 at a time.

What about legitimate uses of sending out many e-mails at a time? How would a popular mailing list cope with this?

Re:Before you get your panties in a wad...

[Anonymous Coward]

In our Brainclone solution:

Solution FAQ

You add domains and emails to your white list. That way you can recieve the mailing list you currently recieve.

Anthony Loera

Re:Before you get your panties in a wad...

[ntr0py]

If it actually is a legitimate use of sending many emails at a time, the user had to have gone through some "subscription" process. Maybe part of that process should involve giving the sender some sort of "key" that could be revoked. On a related note, you could give "keys" to your friends so they wouldn't have to solve the puzzle every time.

The great thing about this is that it only requires MUAs to change, not protocols.

Just a thought.

Re:Before you get your panties in a wad...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is NO unsolicited legitimate mass mailing. For solicited mass mailings one can white list the sender.

A way it could work.

[savage_panda]

If each user had a quota of say 1000 or even 10000 emails sent a month free, and have an emails fee for additional emails, that would help reduce spam while not pissing off the regular users. Another thought is to have each server that re-routes the email to charge a small cost when the quota has been exceeded, that way the spammers that use their dedicated smtp servers will still have to pay.

Hotmail Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

For my Hotmail account, I've been tracking down the source of spam e-mails that reach my inbox for the past few months by examining the headers(I just empty those that go into the junk mail folder). I then contact the appropriate ISP to report the spam.

Ten or more spam e-mails used to reach my inbox each day (with up to 30 going into my junk mail folder). Now, I'm happy to say that my work has paid off, and I'm starting to see results. I generally have as few as 2 or 3 (usually about 5) spams reaching my inbox each day. That's a pretty good improvement!

How to End Spam and learn to play the flute, too

[GeneralEmergency]

.

To end Spam, you must "de-monetize" it.

To do this you must increase the bandwidth loading of the spammer's sponsor (the 'business' paying to have the spam sent) beyond tollerable levels. The only way to do this is with a distributed "insincere curosity attack".

To do this you must write a mail app plug-in that allows you to drop spam into an analyser bucket on your desktop. This analyser would parse the spam for URLs and toll free numbers in the body of the spam. This analyser then routes these "targets" out on to a peer to peer, gnutella style network. As soon as each peer in the network gets about, say, 20 or so copies of that same target submitted from other peers, then a small HTTP client would start making random requests to the target URL or toll free number. This would keep up until the target disapears.

Oh, and to play the Flute, you just blow across the little hole on the one end while moving your fingers back and forth on the outside of the tube.

Lower connection speed?

[Prof.Phreak]

Why not just lower connection speed for all SMTP servers. Well, maybe not "connection", but lets say you are only allowed to send 1 e-mail to one address per 30 seconds.

Probably wouldn't effect 99% of home users, but would make it extraordinarily time consuming to spam even hundreds of people.

This does not work

[cs668]

To counteract this spammers have stared stealing peoples identities by putting some unsuspecting users valid email address in the reply lines of their spam blocks.

When this happens to you is really suck becaus suddenly you are getting thousands of bounced email s back - one for every invalid email address that the spammer tries.

Re:This does not work

[Reziac]

Not to mention billions more spams from the "here's a list of spammers' addresses" pages put up by well-meaning spam haters (with the intent of causing spam to go to those addresses), most of whom don't seem to bother checking whether said address belongs to a hijacked innocent or to a real spammer.

My address was recently used as a FROM by some spammer. With supreme irony, the only person to complain is apparently himself a spammer.

Bastardization of the protesters

[Anonymous Coward]

Listening to WLS. Their painting the protesters as if they were monsters. Whenever they talk about protesters, they make sure to follow it immediately with a report of some war casualty.

I love it it when they say. "Of course we have the right to protest." And then go on for a long time about how horrible the protesters are.

I can't believe the press does this. You'd think of all groups they would understand the importance of respecting everyone's rights. But their time is gonna come when the brown shirts start pulling their chains too. The entire media is starting to sound like Rush Limbaugh. All mind games and bullshit.

Weeeeee! Welcome to America! Have you heard about what's gonna happen if a Red Alert is announced? It's marshall law, people. Want to pick up your kids from school during a Red Alert? Well, they're not going to let you. Is this not an important thing to be aware of? Is the press talking about Red Alert? Nooo. It's all about how evil the protesters are and how glorious the war effort is.

If the nation escalates to "red alert," which is the highest in the color-coded readiness against terror, you will be assumed by authorities to be the enemy if you so much as venture outside your home, the state's anti-terror czar says.

Hey we get yet another "czar" too.

Now WLS is talking about how much they love police, and again how horrible the protesters are. Boy, it doesn't take long for people to put on the brown shirts.

forging of the from: address

[davebaker824]

Could you please describe how an ISP can set up a system to refuse emails that have a forged from: address?

Re:forging of the from: address

[OECD]

Best place to start is the Open Relay Database FAQ or How Can I Fix the Problem. Poke around those sites and you'll find other sources as well.

Of course, most ISPs will be aware of this and have their own mail servers set up correctly. The problem is that most don't enforce it on their customers.

Re:forging of the from: address

[Anonymous Coward]

An ISP cannot refuse email from forged addresses, unless they setup something to content filter incoming SMTP traffic and verify the sender domain in the ie the somewhere.com in user@somewhere.com is sent from a mail server that has an IP owned by somewhere.com.

That said if they are able to spoof email they will quickly respond with forging the packet headers too. And with the spoofing tools being produced the spammer would be able to do it without technical knowhow.

Re:forging of the from: address

[julesh]

Stopping open relays doesn't prevent forged source addresses.

The fact is, that it is impossible to prevent forged source addresses without limiting a number of very useful features of our e-mail network as it stands at the moment. One of which is that I can send an e-mail that appears to be 'from' an address which isn't hosted by my ISP, but is in actual fact forwarded to my ISP account by my web host.

If it wasn't for this ability, everyone would have to use their dialup ISP to provide their web hosting for them (or vice versa). Or have two separate domains, one for their web site and one for their e-mail address. This just couldn't work.

Re:forging of the from: address

[Anonymous Coward]

Your ISP just needs to add your domain to a list of acceptable domains to use as a from address (when sending from within your domain, or when sending from the outside if you authenticate with their mail server) It isn't hard to do, but it is more work for your ISP (so they may want to charge for it and you should be willing to pay a small fee for them to set it up if its that's important to you)

Or, set up your own mail server for your domain. If you already have your own web host, your ISP must allow servers. I do that, and use SMTP over SSL with authentication to send email via my home server from all over the world.

Re:forging of the from: address

[davebaker824]

Maybe there's a workaround.

Let me see if I understand your concern: currently if I host a web site at mywebsite.com, I want a From: me@mywebsite.com to appear in my outgoing emails. If I'm using a dialup ISP for net connectivity, I am using their outgoing mailer (e.g. smtp.myISP.com). If forged source addresses were no longer permitted, I would have to send my email using From: me@smtp.myISP.com. Currently I can just put me@mywebsite.com into my "From:" field by filling in a configuration box on my email software and it works fine.

Is that it?

Re:forging of the from: address

[julesh]

Let me see if I understand your concern: currently if I host a web site at mywebsite.com, I want a From: me@mywebsite.com to appear in my outgoing emails. If I'm using a dialup ISP for net connectivity, I am using their outgoing mailer (e.g. smtp.myISP.com). If forged source addresses were no longer permitted, I would have to send my email using From: me@smtp.myISP.com. Currently I can just put me@mywebsite.com into my "From:" field by filling in a configuration box on my email software and it works fine.


Yep, that's pretty much the capability I'd worry about losing if a 'from' forging prevention policy was put into place.

Re:forging of the from: address

[davebaker824]

Now hunting for workarounds to continue to enjoy this ability, even under a system that prevents forged From: addresses in some fashion:

Possibility 1. Could your web site be set up as an outgoing mail server -- so that you'd use smtp.mywebsite.com instead of having to use smtp.myISP.com even though you're connecting to the net via the ISP? (I'm not sure how much trouble this is, if it can be done.)

Possibility 2. -- Could we have a new line in email headers that says something like "Really-from:"? You'd enter the email account from which you're really sending the message (me@myISP.com) in the Really-from field -- and this would be the email address that would be checked for accuracy by the recipient's machine under some new anti-forgery system, rather than the From: address. It wouldn't be the address that shows up in the "From:" field on the recipient's email client, so it would accommodate your concern about wanting to be able to show your "me@mywebsite.com" email address to the world rather than the uglier "me@myISP.com."

Re:forging of the from: address

[The Evil Couch]

not sure of possibility 1, but possibility 2 isn't that attractive.

when I send business mail through my magazine's STMP, I don't want my recipients to have my ISP's email address, because I want to keep them on a business level. it'd be like giving out all your numbers to everyone you come in contact with.

you just don't want some people to call you at home or on your cell phone.

Re:forging of the from: address

[julesh]

Possibility 1 is possible, but very difficult. The administration involved in setting up a scheme like this without creating thousands of open relays is tricky, and would probably drive up the cost of web hosting by about 50%, but it could be done.

Possibility 2 has already been addressed in another comment - I agree with the conclusion drawn there.

Re:forging of the from: address

[grrliegeek]

Possibility 1 is already in place. I have a domain hosted by YourDomainHost.com. They, and many other hosting providers, provide POP / SMTP access as well as web hosting services. So me@mydomain.com is sent through the SMTP server mydomain.com and not through my ISP. Additionally, I can send mail from anyname@mydomain.com even if anyname is not a valid account (and I do this on Yahoo lists so that certain malicious people don't get my real receiving address to send spam to).

A problem with this.

[OS24Ever]

A huge problem with this, at least here in the United States, is that you start to infringe on the little thing called the first ammendment.

everything you've listed, spam, telemarketing, stopping by the front door, etc equate to someone wanting to say something. It may be something as stupid as 'make money now' or 'enlarge your penis' but it's still protected speech just as much as those guys in white hats that run around in the south.

So they'd challenge it under the first ammendment law.

Now, I'm all for shutting them up. But if you let someone shut them up, our wonderful legal system has a way of taking that shut up as a way to shut other things up, and before you know it, we can't post comments on slashdot.

Re:A problem with this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Put up a "No Trespassing" sign. Then you can shoot solicitors when they step on your property.

Re:A problem with this.

[dabootsie]

Not quite. While the first ammendment protects your right to free speech, but you seem confused as to what that means.

It means you can speak until your tongue falls off in public, your own home, or in private establishments that permit you to speak freely.

If you flap your gums in a private establishment and the owners decide they don't like what you have to say, you can be summarily ejected from said establishment.

Even more importantly, the first ammendment does NOT give you the right to harass people in their homes.

Re:A problem with this.

[Anonymous Coward]

As has been pointed out before on other threads, the First Amendment only guarantees your right to free speech (and only in your home, public areas, etc.), *not* the right to force people to listen...

Another one?

[dabootsie]

We hear about yet another pay-for-email system every few months. Sometimes it's money, and sometimes it's processor cycles...
They never catch on because it requires a change in infrastructure and cooperation amongst all participants, which will never happen.

FAQ on E-Stamp Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.brainclone.com/email.htm

1- Will it cut down my spam, if I know regular that I still recieve crap in USPS regular mail?

Yes, because you set how much stamps some anonymous guy has to pay you to email you. So instead of the 1 stamp (for 0.10 cents) you ask for 100 stamps. You will never recieve email unless someone buys $10 worth of stamps, just to email you 1 email.

2- Nearly All spam comes from Bogus addresses, how can you filter this out?

The current Email server solution, filters out this email. You never see it.

3- My Family wont be able to email me without paying, WTF?

Grab all your family emails, and any work, or billing domains, and add them to your white list. Folks in your white list never pay a thing.

4- Ok people buy e-stamps, do I get anything out of it?

Yeah, you get at least 80% of the bought stamps back to you every month, through either paypal, or a check sent to you.

5- I got this Buthead emailing me spam, and paying for e-stamps, but I really don't want to rais the amount of stamps for anyone, I just don't want to recieve crap from this one idiot, who is harrassing me.

No problem, there are 2 solutions, we have a black list where you put people that you never want to hear from again, but if you fear for your life or want to file charges, you can also call the police, and in such cases we can provide the info to help find the idiot through his banking institution. (which he needs to buy e-stamps with)

SMTP bogus email, will simply not work anymore.

Anymore questions? E-mail me: anthony@Brainclone.com

Ruf

[bogie]

Ruf ruf ruf! Ruf ruf ruf ruf. Ruf ruf ruf ruf ruf ruf?

Sincerely,

Sparky

.

.

needed for lame "postercomment": compression filter

You won't have to pay, the spammers will.

[Hell O'World]

This weeks Cringley column points out a variation on this that makes even more sense to me. His plan is, instead of a tax, the money goes to the recipient, a la PayPal. And, as he states, For most people, their payments and receipts would probably balance out, so only the spammers would really be paying, which would create the equivalent of postal junk mail except in this case the postage goes to the reader, not to the Post Office. And it doesn't require legislation, you could join voluntarily. And you could still use the "white list" as described by Scott Fahlman.

Re:You won't have to pay, the spammers will.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a pretty interesting idea, and you could give clients to options to waive fees for known contacts and mailing lists.

Re:You won't have to pay, the spammers will.

[nullard]

It wouldn't balance out for me. I rarely send e-mail. I get tons of it, though. People who send me mail would not be happy with this system.

Re:You won't have to pay, the spammers will.

[PhilHibbs]

For most people, their payments and receipts would probably balance out,

What would be really neat is the option to donate your stamp money to charity. The balance could go up and down as you receive and send email, but if you find that it is rising, just click "Donate to..." and get a list of charities that accept estamp money. That should cut down on the administrative cost of the system too, because there would be fewer actual cash payouts to handle. IMO, the money should be split between the stamp issuing authority, the receiving ISP (they have to do some admin) and the recipient. I don't think this system would be widely accepted if the costs were over 10c per email. The $1 mentioned in the article is way too high.

last week's poster

[Anonymous Coward]

i think whoever posted last week that they should start suing the advertiser, not the spammer would cut down spam significantly. in the end, you know who it's coming from. it's from whoever hired the spammer to advertise their crap.

the only problem with this (if it ever happened) is that if i got a hard on for getting slashdot in trouble and started mailing spam advertising slashdot then...if all goes well, Slashdot gets sued for sending spam :(

In non-soviet Britain junk mailers subsidize us

[DrSkwid]

when the Post Office recieves money for dropping "the occupier" [that's all - no address] letters through my letter box I believe this enables them to keep the price of postage at what the market will bear.

Modification

[sgt101]

I would like to see a system where you were able to have two mail boxes - one that was public and caught all unsolicited mail. This could have a list of authorised users, and could forward mail from them to you. Non-authorised users could buy a stamp as suggested here, and then the public mail box could forward it on.

This would mean that people could pay to contact you, for example to change address or get in touch. Your friends and close collegues could use email as in the good old days.

Forgeries

[liquidsin]

What about spammers that forge the FROM address? Some mail would still get through the whitelists that way. What about the guy who's address he forges, or whose authorization code he steals? If a spammer gets hold of your auth code, are you required to pay for the millions of emails he sends with it? And since this requires all of our mail servers to be updated with new software, why not just write a better protocol that lets us keep out the spam while keeping email free.

Re: I'd love to see something done

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he's a liberal. The answer to everything is more government. There's no need for individual responsibility.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[SerpentMage]

Ok so let me get this straight I still need to pay to send email to my business associates? This is really silly.

Some email is from friends, but quite a bit of my email is from business people, people who attend my conferences, courses, etc. This will add costs that I really do not want added. And if the costs are so low that it does not bother me then it will not bother the SPAMMERS either to pay the amount.

We have junk and that is all there is to it....

Fastmail.fm with SpamAssasin RULEZ!

[ChaoticChaos]

I'm real, real happy with Fastmail's (http://www.fastmail.fm) ability to send Spam to a "junk" folder with SpamAssasin's help.

Honestly, Spam isn't an issue for me.

Spam Escrow and the Slippery Slope

[fuzzybunny]

"User" of _what_ exactly? This is not AOL, this is the great big wild and woolly Internet that nobody runs, remember?

I like the idea someone came up with not-too-long ago of a communications 'escrow' system, whereby anybody wishing to send me any form of communication would be required to acquire some form of credit by paying into an account. $x for a phone call, $y for an email, etc., with changes in price for different permutations (time of day, size of communication, etc.)

The premise of this whole idea was that, unlike paying someone for the privilege of sending someone else spam (the whole idea of 'e-stamp' is a stretch, because when you buy a postage stamp, you are essentially paying your bit to the international post office system to deliver your mail--I have my doubts that an electronic communications tariff would really go to all those mom and pop providers out there), with a communications escrow system you are guaranteeing me money if I don't accept your right to communicate with me.

So, say Alice wants to send Bob an email, she has to agree to deposit $.25 in an account. If Bob agrees to accept her communications, she gets back the $.25. If Bob dislikes it, he keeps the quarter.

It's not very thought-through, but I find it a far more interesting approach to the unsolicited communications problem than the usual hue and cry of "force a tax on anyone wanting to spam". It addresses the issue between the individuals involved in a communication, and ensures that legitimate comms remain free.

Charging a non-retrievable-under-any-circumstances mandatory fee for every email sent, regardless of how small, has the potential to snowball into a behemoth that throttles Internet communications. After all, wasn't the first US federal income tax rate somewhere around half a percent or so? If email carries a mandatory charge, that has to go to _someone_, _somewhere_, and that's not going to be the recipient. How willing do you think that someone is going to be to ever give up that source of revenue?

Unfortunately I can't find the link. Anyone?

Forgetting something

[Adam9]

A lot of the spam are nw on dialups/cable/dsl from giant ISPs that could care less. Especially when they're outside of your home country. I was being DoSd once from a couple of cable provider. I called one of them up (both were national providers) and they're autogreeting told me I needed a court subpoena before they would take action. That is what I mean by them not caring.

only bad can come of this

[frovingslosh]

"As crappy as it sounds, charging some tiny fee per email would cut spam dramatically. 207 of the buggers so far today. Hundreds of megs a month. I'd love to see something done. "

Charging this way for e-mail will do nothing at all positive to stop spam, it will in fact have just the opposite effect.

The big time spammers are tightly in league with their service providers, this "postage" cost will not be a real cost for them at all, but it will have major impacts on any legitimate use of e-mail. Shoestring organizations that link hundreds or a few thousand worldwide members with useful, informative e-mail messages will be put out of action cold. New business models that automatically e-mail you important information that you want (such as confirmation of delivery, or news or sports information) will have to rethink their options and either cut back such inovative services or charge additional for it. Even individuals will be less likely to send quick acknowledgments when they know the will eventually be bled dry by snowballing small charges.

Meanwhile, the spammers who don't really pay these charges at all (either because they are in league with their ISP, they are their own ISP and so pay themselves, or they are using a temporary account, viouating it's terms of service, and intend to abandon it and pay nothing) will claim that because of this bogus e-mail postage charge they somehow have a paid for right to overflow your in-box to the point that you can't get legitimate e-mail and waste even more of your time sorting through their deceptive crap so that you don't happen to miss that rare but important legitimate message.

Given that this lame idea will not prevent any spam, and will certainly have negative impacts on legit users, it should not at all be encouraged as "anything as long as it might fight spam" or "I'd love to see something done." but rather but rather be actively discouraged as the bad idea that it is.

Too much hassle for email recipient

[Kakurenbo Shogun]

I think a system like this would cause too much hassle for email recipients in a variety of situations. Here's a quick example:

You sign up on a website that sends you an activation code for your account there. The site you signed up on is a small business that can't afford to pay to get this email through to you. So either you have to remember to add their email address to your free whitelist, or you don't receive the email (and many users wouldn't have any clue why). The small business thus gets so much less business that they go under.

The same goes for subscribing to an eZine or mail lists (can you imagine how many bounces bugtraq would have to deal with?), receiving any other email from a site where you sign up, etc. And every time a friend changed their email address or you met someone new, you'd have to update your whitelist.

This kind of system would be useless for an email address where you accepted bug reports for products, etc. (any address that you would HAVE to keep open for free).

I guess if there are people who would want to use such a system, then I'm all for someone creating it. But I won't be using it, and I can't see myself paying to get my emails through.

Re:Too much hassle for email recipient

[Nonesuch]

You sign up on a website that sends you an activation code for your account there. The site you signed up on is a small business that can't afford to pay to get this email through to you. So either you have to remember to add their email address to your free whitelist, or you don't receive the email (and many users wouldn't have any clue why). The small business thus gets so much less business that they go under.

Simple solution -- They include on the sign up form a field in which you can paste an 'e-stamp', either an actual pre-paid single use postage, or a personal 'reusable delivery pass' (certificate) allowing their domain to send to your account.

This has a precedent in the real world, remember the ads that say "For more information, send a Self Addressed Stamed Envelope (SASE)" ?

The same goes for subscribing to an eZine or mail lists (can you imagine how many bounces bugtraq would have to deal with?), receiving any other email from a site where you sign up, etc. And every time a friend changed their email address or you met someone new, you'd have to update your whitelist.

This kind of system would be useless for an email address where you accepted bug reports for products, etc. (any address that you would HAVE to keep open for free).

Same idea would work for Bugtraq and vendor mailings -- when you sign up, there would be an additional field for you to supply a revokable "pass" permitting email inbound from their server for free to your email address without postage.

If a site abuses the pass you provide, you can revoke the certificate.

TMDA

[gmuslera]

and similars have an scheme of whitelisting and some sort of "validation" of the recipient if it is not in the whitelist. Replying for confirmation, or saying what word is in a graphic, or even do some cpu intensive task to enable the message to be sended are free ways to at least ensure that there is someone reading behind the email.

Asking for some kind of money (even for charity) for sending mail to something will stop a lot of people of sending email, even mail that you would want to receive. Suppose that I want to mail someone with this system because he have a worm, or an open relay, warn him about something or whatever that he wants to know. If I have to pay to do a favor to someone, well, I will forget about it. Worst than this, suppose that the author of this paper use the system, and I want to warn him of a problem there, well, in this case the problem will happen in the worst moment possible, but I will not warn him.

A very bad thing

[truthsearch]

Hardware and CPU cycles for servers cost a lot of money. Purposefully burning cycles without actually performing any work will cost the OE customer money.

Frankly, I don't care if MS made my mail program go slower

Are you kidding? Since when does speed and cost not matter? You obviously don't run OE for a big company or you should be fired just for saying that.

Re:A very bad thing

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't understand Penny Black. The idea is that if you, as Joe Private Citizen send an email to Jane Private Citizen, the Penny Black "stamp" will add a couple of seconds to the process of actually sending the message. It's not a hardship for sending out one or two or 10 messages. It _is_ a hardship for sending out 10,000 messages out of the datacenter in the basement of your new, multi-million dollar home.

Re:A very bad thing

[truthsearch]

It's also a hardship for sending one e-mail to all 10,000 of my employees.

Re:A very bad thing

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can forget real mailing lists. Where does that leave linux-kernel?

Re:A very bad thing

[gbjbaanb]

No, I don't run Outlook Express for any company.

1. How many large companies run OE?!!?!

2. How many large companies have their users write mail using the server, instead of their client PC? (which would do the signing).

3. Maybe Lotus Notes users, but they're used to extreme slowness ;-)

Seriously, I'm typing this and the CPU is busy doing nothing, in its terms. I'd not notice one iota. If I tried sending 10,000 mails automatically on the other hand, I'd have to go get one hell of a lot of coffees.

Re:A very bad thing

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, but how many of your employees want bigger penises?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I like it !!!

[benking]

I think they are on the right track. The reason spam is so prevalent is because it is so inexpensive. Attacking it on an economic level is the way to go. Law won't work because they would only work inside a jurisdiction, and the inter net knows no boundaries. That is assuming you could enforce them in the first place and I doubt that very much. The only thing it is missing is a way for the recipient to allow messages from someone NOT on the white list. Because there it is certain to be a friend or family member you did not put on your white list they will be treated as a spammer and not get through with out paying.

Chemisor Also had a good idea as well. If the SMTP protocol was extended to verify the sending address and or reply address the mail servers could filter out the most of the spam that clogs out in-boxes.

I AM SO POSTAL!

[Anonymous Coward]

*blam* "No!!" *blam* *blam* *blam* "AHH!!!" *blam* *blam* *blam* "Oh god no!" *blam* *click-kchak* *blam* *blam* *blam* *blam* "Augh!!" *blam* *blam* *blam* *blam*

Bwahahaha!!

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[Anonymous Coward]

This will work... except when either the origin of SPAM is untraceable, or they make some claim you opted in to receive their valueable offer and have waived any fee. 100% of SPAM will fall under one of those two exceptions. Good luck collecting.

I still prefer the hashcash solution.

[kramer]

While e-stamps seem like a good idea, I still prefer the hashcash solution. The solution is basically the sender has to show that they've done a certain amount of computational work for a mail to be accepted.

It has several advantages that pay solutions don't.

It doesn't require a micropayment solution

It doesn't require a central registry

An additional benefit is that for small senders the cost remains negligibly small -- perhaps 2 seconds per e-mail address sent to. For spammers 2 seconds per e-mail address is a huge burden. If you're trying to mail to 10 million addresses, you need 231 hours of processor time to compute the hashcash "stamp" required for all the address. It's not an impossible feat, but if a spammer needs to set up server farms just to compute stamps their profit margins shrink signifigantly.

Group working on an implementation of hashcash

Spam Killers Not Enough?

[mchappee]

I'm not trolling, but isn't a spam filter enough? I, too, was burdened by spam. I'd get 100 per day, and was growing very frustrated. Last week I installed Spamassassin and the problem is gone. I still get a couple per day, but it's no longer a big deal. Am I a "best case scenario" for spam filters? Why wouldn't Taco just run spamassassin and be done with it?

What am I missing?

Re:Spam Killers Not Enough?

[American AC in Paris]

I'm not trolling, but isn't a spam filter enough? I, too, was burdened by spam. I'd get 100 per day, and was growing very frustrated. Last week I installed Spamassassin and the problem is gone. I still get a couple per day, but it's no longer a big deal. Am I a "best case scenario" for spam filters? Why wouldn't Taco just run spamassassin and be done with it?

What am I missing?

Bandwidth.

If you're filtering 100 messages per day, those messages are still making it all the way from the spammer's system to your mail server (or even your computer itself, depending on the type of filtering you use.) If each of the 1000 people who use your (relatively small) ISP get 100 messages a day, that's 100,000 pieces of spam a day. Seeing as a lot of spam now comes in easy-to-digest 48k and 123k attachment crapbombs, you're talking massive amounts--gigabytes and gigabytes--of spam that gets sent over your ISP's lines every day.

Filtering is, in many ways, a catalyst in the "spam eats up bandwidth" equation. Since you never need to deal with the mail, you're not nearly as likely to get up in arms about the mass of crap flowing over your network. You'll still pay for it though, in the form of higher access charges, slower server response, and less money at your ISP to go towards support or more useful tasks.

The Internet Powers That Be don't care one whit about the time people lose sifting through their junk mail--that's Somebody Else's Problem. By that point, the damage is done.

Re:Saddam Hussein -- Dead at 54!

[Anonymous Coward]

That has given me a mental image of Saddam on one of those shitty pop idol shows...

NO

[Azureflare]

No way. This is a very bad idea, and I strongly oppose it. I do not get spam. I do not want to pay for emails I send, because other people #1 give out their email addresses to untrusted sources, #2 have emails with a serviceprovider who gives their emails to other "trusted" sources, #3 have email addresses which are easily randomly generated. If you get an outrageous amount of spam, it's no fault but your own.

Re:NO

[KMAPSRULE]

How is this a troll? I was stating my opinion that I think there is a lot of room for abuse of a policy like this????

Re:NO

[Oswald]

Did you even RTFA? You only pay for email that people decide was an unwelcome intrusion on their time. It's their decision, made AFTER they read your email. Do you send a lot of email that makes people resentful?

funny...

[rizzo420]

i get absolutely no spam. why? because i don't post my email account. i'm sure taco has a private email account that all his friends and family use and only has his slashdot account for the stupid slashdotters who sign him up for stupid spam lists. the difference between spam email and junk mail is that all street addresses are public knowledge (hence the reason why they're addressed to "resident" and not a person). i think it'd be terrible to charge per email. i can't believe i'd ever hear taco say that it should cost money to do that.

Why cannot we have a law?

[pussyco]

The only argument I've seen against an anti-spam law is concerns over freedom of speech. These concerns are easily met. The law need only say:

Port 25 (the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol port) is reserved for human to human communication. It is an offence to cause or permit a robot to post to multiple messages to it.

It is easy to craft an exception for mailing lists that do the three step, subscribe, validate, confirm thing.

First ammendent jurisprudence lets the government regulate speech provided its regulations are narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. What kinds of things count as compelling the US government? Other rights in the Bill of Rights, and laws of physics. For example, if you have two radio transmitters broadcasting on the same frequency each will interfere with the other. This is the justification for Government regulation of the radio spectrum. One way of looking at it is that freedom of speech is played off against freedom of speech. It is hard to oppose government regulation of the radio spectrum on the grounds of freedom of speech if the consequence is that neither speaker will be heard. Equally, it would be very hard to argue in court for the admission of robots to the designated human-to-human channel on freedom of speech grounds when the cause of the regulation was that humans were finding it hard to talk to each other because their channel was being swamped by robot traffic.

Notice also that this proposal avoids violating the first ammendment because it focuses on solving the problem we have, and leaving alone a similar problem that we don't have. Specifically, some-one who wishes to offer you a penis enlarger remains at liberty to get your email address from any source and type in and send an email to you, with their offer. They may repeat this, obtaining somebody elses email address, typing in a fresh message, and sending them a similar offer. They may repeat this as long as their stamina holds out and their fingers will keep tapping away at the keyboard. All that is forbidden is automating the process and then using the humans only port.

It won't work, the wrong people are getting paid!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should the end user get paid? Why not the ISP? Afterall who has their resources and bandwidth used up?

Stamps to mark mail as Non-Spam

[stagmeister]

I don't know about "e-stamps" for *all* e-mail, but what about an optional thing for e-stamps that would mark your mail as non-junk? Like, I could by 100 e-stamps (say, for 5 cents each). I could use them on specific emails that I want to (I wouldn't necessarily use them on all of them, only certain ones), and those ones would automatically be let through spam filters. Then we could have filters find those e-stamps, and if it has one, would let it through automatically. This could solve the problem of false positives in spam filters, and also would start costing spam companies major money!

Not very feasible

[acidrain69]

Oh sure, lets just change the entire email infrastructure.

</sarcasm>

If we can't get a majority of the systems out there to install patches, how is this going to work? Besides, aren't a majority of spam email routed through open servers in China or something? We can't make China do squat.

Oh the irony of /. ads

[bigmouth_strikes]

I got this image as an ad below the story. First I thought it was part of the story itself...

http://images.slashdot.org/banner/ciph0004en.gif?1 048263156125

Re:It won't work, the wrong people are getting pai

[Anonymous Coward]

In our solution at Brainclone:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=57921&thresh ol d=0&commentsort=1&tid=111&mode=thread&cid=5565 115

we pay the ISP up to 20%

Anthony

Why not make the sender perform computation for ea

[Ex Machina]

http://www.cypherspace.org/~adam/hashcash/

Zone Labs?

[Anonymous Coward]

GUYS:

Zone Labs has a new product out ($30 full retail) that is designed to reduce spam. It has considerable capability but one really neat feature.

If you mark a letter as SPAM, it returns that letter to the sender as if your email account no longer exists. It creats a return message identical to the return message your mail server would send (for a non existant -- or terminated account).

I understand that spammers use these messages to delete discontinued addresses from their SPAM lists.

How about that guys?

Tom

Postal Service

[ElDuderino44137]

The only way to "truely" stop spam is for organizations like the "US Postal Service" to get up-to-date with technology and run a set of secure servers across the country to deal with nothing but eMail. These servers would talk to thier own eMail clients and not have anything to do with any other server outside of their trusted set of servers. End of story. Any other solution will be "forged" or "compromised".

just change your email address

[bigpat]

hey just change your email address every two years. I was getting so much junk email that I decided to change addresses. Just gave out the new email address to friends and haven't gotten on anyone's list yet.

Very simple solution.

Just to warn you, I'm applying for a patent, so if you change your email address to avoid spam you owe me $5.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[Reziac]

So much for businesses that depend on new customer contacts via email. No one is going to PAY to contact a business for the first time.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[bmongar]

An even better idea is a spam deposit, like the stamp idea. But the reciever gets to decide if it is spam, a yes means the charge is made and a no means the charge isn't made. I also think that the fee shouldn't entirely go to the reciever if it is spam, it should be split with the isp.

fighting spam with authentication

[datrus]

I think a solution against spam would be to have
an authentication mechanism that identifies the sender.

Users would have to pay only once a small amount of money to get a pub/priv key pair from a certification authority.

Then users would use this pair to authenticate the messages they sent.

E-mail recipients could then simply choose to enable or disable reception of unauthenticated messages.

David

junk mail and costs

[zogger]

--I probably don't have all the details correctly, but here's the gist of the funniest and most practical example of junk snail mail I ever heard of. It was back duing the energy crisis of the 70's. It was on one of those TV shows like "That's Incredible". This guy up in new hampshire gets a brainstorm, his heating bills are outta sight. He gets himself on-purpose on every junk mailing list he can find, I mean goes WAY out of his way. Pretty soon he's getting mailbags full a day coming to his house. He gets one of those paper-log roller machines, rolls up the junk mail and burns it in his woodstove!

What I did for electronic spam and getting mailed viruses is I stopped being on lists, stopped using my email addy except to a few friends. It's taken awhile but I'm down to only a few a day now, easy enough to delete. Also using that "junk" feature with mozilla, but no idea if I'm even using it correctly, but I really only get a few now.

Re:junk mail and costs

[Alan Partridge]

yeah, and if you become a COMPLETE recluse, you need never speak to, see or be seen by another living soul in your life!

Not using email is NOT THE ANSWER to spam.

Re:junk mail and costs

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

Not using email is NOT THE ANSWER to spam.

Worked pretty well for me so far.

God I'm so lonely.

My Solution

[flyneye]

As a group,you could pool your money and pay me,per odious spammer,to locate,castrate and render the hide off each one.(for a lil extra i will sell the
leftovers as momentos.)
since i have time,no employment presently,and a hatred for spammers that equals yours,it only makes sense.
I figure about $5000 per spampig would cover my expenses.$100 could get you their yarbles in a jar.$1.95 could buy their worthless hide(s&h fees)
think about it. it really isnt a lot once you have a bunch to pitch in.anything leftover we could buy beer with.

DDoS spammer websites....

[stuartkahler]

Any plan that includes adding fees to everyone's internet costs will never be allowed. We need to punish spammers where it hurts. They are usually based or routed through foreign countries, so suing them is costly. Once they have sent their million e-mails, they don't care if you managed to track down the service that sent the e-mails and lock them out. The only thing of value left is the website included in the e-mail that they want people to click on.

This is where DDoS comes in. Spammers usually hope for just a few hundred buys out of millions of e-mails sent out. If the website is getting pounded down by thousands of hits per minute, potential suckers won't have a chance. Or at a minimum, the spammer will get clobbered by a massive bandwidth bill. The best case would be that the ISP quickly sees what a loser site they are hosting and deletes the account. American ISPs already refuse to relay spam. It's about time they stopped hosting the websites as well.

Hopefully as ISPs get used to spammer websites killing their bandwidth and causing outages, they would add provisions to the user agreements charging penalties for massive bandwidth spikes that bring the rest of their network down. Most spammers would probably stop if they were facing a $1000 fine from their ISP just for trying to hawk their penis cream, herbal breast remedy, viagra knockoffs, russian brides, lose 20 pounds this weekend, teen sex, online casino, cable descrambler, DVD copier and special mortgage rates.

IBM researcher is TOO LATE

[BigJimSlade]

The US Postal Service is already PLANNING TO DO THIS. This must be stopped at all costs! Please forward to all your friends! URGENT!
</sarcasm>

Damn, Taco

[Jack Auf]

[mild_flame]
I often see you /. editors complaining about spam.
1. DNSBL (ORBS, SPEWS, etc)
2. /etc/mail/access
3. dnl accept_unresolvable_domains
4. (optional) IPChains/IPTables blocking.
Really, you're supposed to be geeks. We have *tools* to handle these sorts of things. Yes 1-3 are sendmail specific, but there are methods for Postfix and Qmail as well.
[/mild_flame]

I get maybe three spams a day now, down from over 100 a day. It's just not that hard to make spammers your bitch.

Then what's the fee for?

[Gerry Gleason]

If I have to hand out some sort of token to each person who can send me email, then the problem is solved without exchanging any fees. Certainly, this could work, but it is likely to be more cumbersome than most people want to put up with.

SPAM filtering is certainly one answer that can probably be made to work very well for most people in most situations, but we are also aware of the many problems with this. Either you set it up and maintain it yourself, or you rely on your ISP (ala AOL's filtering discussed here) or software vendor and you probably lose a lot of control.

Clearly, there is also a role for law enforcement as well, and they don't seem to be even trying at this point. In any case, this is really the approach for the worst offenders; nobody should have to deal with unsolicited, explicite emails and this should an a minimum be criminal, and actively pursued and prosecuted. More can be done from this angle (required notice that it is advertisement, for example).

time based ?

[DrSkwid]

Despite it sounding an interesting thought experiment it's a bit grim if you go to all the trouble of killing someone but get the time wrong. My car bomb could fail to go off and then explode under investigation the next day rendering my prediction useless thus I will not be recompensed for my risk.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[Stonehead]

Hmm. You could easily whitelist people with GnuPG's Ring of Trust-idea. I hope that one catches on.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[rutledjw]

Did you READ the article? I may be reaching a bit here, but it often helps to do that BEFORE posting.

Only unknown addresses will be charged, you could probably extend known addresses to include entire domains. Finally, if there's a third party involved, I would think it would be trivial to refund these charges from legitimate people. Finally, you don't HAVE to charge for unknown recipients.

And if the costs are so low that it does not bother me then it will not bother the SPAMMERS either to pay the amount.

Wrong, it WILL bother and even stop many spammers. They're business model completetly depends on their ability to send millions of e-mail messages a day without cost. If you start incurring costs, you've just blown their business model. Even if it's half a cent. Let's see, what's that crazy thing called again? Oh yeah MATH:

$.005 X 1,000,000 messages = $5000

So for each mass mailing of that size, the spammer is paying $5000. Currently a lot of the big guys are sending out over 10 million a week! Hello? That's a log of money!

Now maybe they'll have to actually FOCUS thier mailings and maybe even (gasp!) start pushing products that aren't of dubious value and legal content. Junk is here, but we don't have to tolerate this amount or content.

People will pay...

[Frater 219]

Especially in light of the fact that probably 99 percent of everyone who uses email doesnt give a shit about spam.

If that's so, then why are the major consumer ISPs currently in an advertising battle over who has the best spam filtering? I can't hardly turn on the television these days without seeing an ad from AOL, Earthlink, or MSN touting "now with better spam blocking!" or "protects your kids' email from porn spam!" The one with the butterfly dumping the spammers down the hole is kind of funny, no?

The fact that the majors are advertising spam filtering to the general public indicates to me that they perceive a demand. My guess is that their tech support staff went to the bosses and said, "You know, we're sick of Mabel Homemaker ringing us up and bitching us out about the Russian teen porn spam her husband and kids get. If the mail admins would start using SBL, we could play more Quake -- I mean, handle more important calls."

Re:People will pay...

[VirtualAdept]

I'm not sure that's indicative of a desire for better spam filtering, or a bunch of major consumer ISPs trying desperately to differentiate themselves from the other two in a way that doesn't cut their profit margins to the *bone*.

There's an easier way

[netruner]

You don't need a pay-per-use system to keep spam off the net. All you need is an authentication system that tells you whether or not an email came from an authentic person. This could be accomplised using weak public key encryption. Keep a bank of public keys (in a database similar in function to a DNS) and make certain that these came from real people. Then have mail clients automatically try to decrypt messages as they are received. If they're not encrypted or if they don't decrypt to the public key from the public database, trash the email.

Making certain that all the public keys came from real people would be critical to the credibility of the system. Charge a per-year or per-month fee to have your key on this system. Make it billable to a credit card, and if any key is found to be spamming, the credit card that it is billed to should no longer be accepted by the system. At least this way, spammers have to mess with their credit to keep spamming. If they use someone else's card to spam, then you have a crime to be reported to autorities.

Anyone who wants to implement this idea- please cut me in.

Stupid idea

[Jesus IS the Devil]

Here we go with another stupid idea to curb spam.

Basically the author is saying we should have to PAY to have spam stopped. Not only will it NOT work, but it'll just mean that spam would be ok if they pay to send it.

simple vs. complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of simply charging for every e-mail
Here's what I would like to see:
1) I set up a small list of people who can send e-mail to me for free.
2) Anyone else has to pay 50 cents. Half goes to me, half goes to overhead for collecting the money, etc.

If someone wants to e-mail me out of the blue, they still can, and then request that I put them on my free list, for the next time around.
Spammers always have to pay.

Re:We are doing it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you will get only what you want, we have been working on it, and are beta testing our solution now.

In our Brainclone solution:

QUICK F AQ:
1- Will it cut down my spam, if I know regular that I still receive crap in USPS regular mail?
Yes, because you set how much stamps some anonymous guy has to pay you to email you. So instead of the 1 stamp (for 0.10 cents) you ask for 100 stamps. You will never receive email unless someone buys $10 worth of stamps, just to email you 1 email.

2- Nearly All spam comes from Bogus addresses, how can you filter this out?
The current Email server solution, filters out this email. You never see it.

3- My Family wont be able to email me without paying, what about my mailing list I am subscribed to??
Grab all your family emails, mailing list email, and any work, or billing domains, and add them to your white list. Folks in your white list never pay a thing.

4- Ok people buy e-stamps, do I get anything out of it?
Yeah, you get at least 80% of the money from bought stamps every month, through either paypal, or a check sent to you. ISP's/Service Providers will be paid the other 20%

5- I got this Buthead emailing me spam, and paying for e-stamps, but I really don't want to rais the amount of stamps for anyone, I just don't want to receive crap from this one idiot, who is harassing me.
No problem, there are 2 solutions, we have a black list where you put people that you never want to hear from again, but if you fear for your life or want to file charges, you can also call the police, and in such cases we can provide the info to help find the idiot through his banking institution. (which he needs to buy e-stamps with)

SMTP bogus email, will simply not work anymore.

Anymore questions?

E-mail me: anthony@Brainclone.com

Anthony Loera

Re:How to End Spam and learn to play the flute, to

[Reziac]

Somehow I'm reminded of this:

"Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[rutledjw]

You don't have to charge. Just set up your customer service account to not charge for unknown addresses...

RTFA!!!

[ThinWhiteDuke]

Wow, more than 100 posts already and still 90% of posters obviously did not grasp the (rather) simple concept. I've seen a number of completely irrelevant objections:

The law would never pass : That's one of the best feature in this idea. No need for a new law. The recipient already has the right to block incoming messages. You know, when your phone rings, you won't go to jail if you don't take the call.

Spammers will never accept this : Of course not, but nobody asks them! Using this kind of solution is YOUR decision; you don't have to ask anybody's permission, especially spammers.

Widespread adoption will never occur : So what? This system will work for me even if I'm the only user. It's not one of those things that require a critical mass of users to be useful.

This will not completely eradicate spam : Frankly, I don't care. If it prevents spam sent to me, it's good enough.

5 cents to read spam is not worth it : You're missing the point. This is not about making money, it's about discouraging spammers. No spammer will ever send you an email if it costs him 5 cents. And the price is not for making you actually read the spam, it's only for allowing it to reach your inbox. In the very unlikely case a spammer actually pays, just delete the message as usual.

So please, read the article. The idea may not be completely new (email stamp) but the details address most obvious objections.

One problem I can think of is still pending : what happens if the sender is also equiped with a similar system? Will we see payment notices bouncing back and forth between both ends without ever reaching an inbox? I guess a solution would be to automatically whitelist any address you've sent an email to, if only for 1 hour.

Now, the really funny part is that ALL of the above (including subject line) is the exact post I submitted on Dec 10, in reply to an article about the same research by the same researcher.
We're discovering the notion of meta-dupe: it's a dupe slashdot story with dupe replies. By the way, my original post was modded +5 informative. If this one gets modded +5 too, we will achieve uber-meta-dupe status: the exact same story, with the exact same comment, with the exact same moderation. Perpetual motion, sorta...

Re:RTFA!!!

[supergiovane]

Widespread adoption will never occur : So what? This system will work for me even if I'm the only user. It's not one of those things that require a critical mass of users to be useful.

For what I understood, it works like the Tobin Tax: a very little fee for legitimate mail (I send say 1000 e-mails per years, even if I'll have to pay one cent for each one, it's only ten dollars) which becomes a proibitive amount for people sending millions of e-mails per week.

If the percentage of users requiring the fee drops, either the cost per mail has to drop or there is the possibility that spammers would not care of the increase in costs and will not blacklist me (the costs for purging their address lists could be more than the fees required by a small amount of recipients). I agree that probably even a very low percentage of people requiring fees should be enough to constrain spammers to avoid their addresses.

However the idea is good IMHO.

If this one gets modded +5 too, we will achieve uber-meta-dupe status

Sorry, I just finished my moderator points, but I promise that the third time htey will post this story I'll mod you up.

Re:RTFA!!!

[stand]

Ahhhh! Finally someone who has read the article! You've just made my friends list. I even like David Bowie.

One problem I can think of is still pending : what happens if the sender is also equiped with a similar system? Will we see payment notices bouncing back and forth between both ends without ever reaching an inbox? I guess a solution would be to automatically whitelist any address you've sent an email to, if only for 1 hour.

Yes the general case of mail bouncing has to be dealt with, but doesn't a bounced message contain headers that identify it as bounced? I think the system should be able to handle bounces pretty easily.

Congratulations on the uber-meta-dupe thing. It had to happen eventually.

What to do with the $$?

[scottbot]

Maybe they could donate all the e-stamp cash to NASA.

It might work out.

[SatanicPuppy]

I'm not one for paying for anything I don't have to (Witness my email addy. Let M$ pay for anyone who wants to flame me.) but I don't see anything wrong with a kind of toll. "This user doesn't want unsolicited email, and you're not on the list, so if you want access you gotta pony up some change."

This would certainly wipe out the low end of the spam world; webcams, anatomical enlargements, etc. If some decent sized corporation wants to send me mail, that's fine.

The problem comes in through identity checking. How do you know the person who is sending you mail is on the list? I'm sure everyone here knows how to send email from a port 25 hack; even if you don't, it's completely obvious that spammers know how to forge whatever name they want.

So, in order for this to work, digital signatures would have to become much more common. Which I don't see happening any time soon. (vis a vis, if you only accepted digitally signed email, there would be no spam.)

Blah blah. I'll just stick with my filtering.

Just my 0.113620 Egyptian pounds's worth.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[Reziac]

That's fine if you're big enough. But my business is a one-man band, and I do rely on email contacts out of the blue to stay in business. Which means it's email thru my regular ISP. Now what??

The biggest issue with spam.

[zentigger]

The biggest problem is plain old ignorance. If people would stop buying penis pumps and ink-jet refills from spammers, it would fail to be a useful marketing tool.

As it is, legislation is barely useful. In the few states where spam has been legislated, it is almost impossible to charge anyone with a violation and claim damages, the process is far too encumbering--that is if you can actually track down the spammer. The few people that actually do get charged are usually (fairly) legitimate, i.e. big business where you signed up for a service, and they are notifiying you of something new. This really does not account for the heart of the problem which is the thousands of schmucks in their basement selling email lists to each other and polluting our inboxes.

No, legislation is not really the answer. I propose a spammer bounty: An organisation that people can report known spammers to. Caught your neighbour sending spam? Report them. Post all of their personal details: name, address, photos, license plate, etc, etc... and then organize public protests around their homes. Get local busniess to unite and refuse to serve these people. Make their life a living hell. After a few good examples of this vigilante justice, see how quickly spammers give up!

Re:The biggest issue with spam.

[Alsee]

The biggest problem is plain old ignorance. If people would stop buying penis pumps and ink-jet refills from spammers, it would fail to be a useful marketing tool.

You can't fix the spam problem from the "demand side". Spam is often profitable with a response rate of 1 in 10,000. The level of mental illness in the general population is higher than that.

-

solution works except when applied to real life

[yoha]

Let me just proposed a couple of scenarios where this doesn't work:

1. When you have a group of friends and non-friends who "Reply-to-All" in email discussions.
2. On the job search, and receiving email from potential job leads. I cannot see any circumstance where a potential employer would pay money to contact a potential employee.
3. Any scenario where you are looking to receive email from strangers, auctions, dating sites, etc.

I use Hotmail's Exclusive filter and it works brilliantly. I scoop out the good emails from the Junk folder, which amounts to about 2-3 a week. I leave my mailing lists in the junk file so that they are automatically deleted every week.

Great...

[theNote]

In this scenario spamming would be a tax deductible expense.

I don't think anyone wants to see that.

Charging for email? Here come the taxes!

[z7209]

Before you know it your goddamned micropayments are going to be macro.

I can't believe people are falling for this, and what I really can't believe is that congress hasn't yet realized what a great source of tax revenue this will be. Yeah...this new micropayment will stop spam, right, now only the rich companies can spam.

Is your mailbox any less full every day because they have to pay to get it there. My god what idiots are pushing this stuff?

Problems...

[PinkFloyd]

This faces a similar problem that MP3.com and the like have seen. You can't start charging money for something that has been both free and open for so long.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[Nonesuch]

This will work... except when either the origin of SPAM is untraceable, or they make some claim you opted in to receive their valueable offer and have waived any fee. 100% of SPAM will fall under one of those two exceptions. Good luck collecting.

No need for "collecting".

The analogy is to a stamp -- an anonymous pre-paid postage unit that can only be used once, and has intrinsic value as well as anti-forgery features (strong crypto).

The sender would need to pre-purchase a quantity of "stamps", and would have to "spend" a stamp for a message to be accepted.

Some recipients might waive the fee for all senders, while others might issue "franking priviledges" to their friends, basically a sender-specific stamp that can be used repeatedly (unless revoked).

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[rossifer]

So much for businesses that depend on new customer contacts via email. No one is going to PAY to contact a business for the first time.

Read the article. You get to choose your whitelist. A company's "info request" email address wouldn't require anyone to pay because limiting access is not the goal of having that email address.

You or I might because we don't want strangers who aren't serious about making contact. Though a similar spam filter (requiring a reply/response step to be auto-added to the whitelist) apparently caused too much wanted email to be lost because too many human senders were unwilling to go through the trouble of sending a second email to get their first email through.

I forsee that this will have similar difficulties.

Regards,
Ross

Sounds a lot like this week's I, Cringley article

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out Cringley's recent article. Says basically the same thing, I believe.

Not much more! This is a bad idea.

[twitter]

think of how much you would get if sending junk mail was free

The 2.3 cents per envelope paid in postage can hardly be the largest cost of real life junk mail. TRANSFAL, bud. You could jack up the costs of email to real life levels and you would get the same amount of email, because it's still cheaper than TV, billboards, radio and all that. In fact it's the only way to reach many people so anoyed with adverts that they no longer watch TV listen to radio and make laws against billboards. They will come and they will pay.

In any case the aproach is completely backward.

I'll pay a stamp for Email when the US government or some private company sets up a system just as good as real life mail. If someone can devise such a system where there are NO ACCESS charges whatsoever and all the work but writing the mail is done for me, a stamp might be a reasonable way to pay. As it is, I pay a private company for wires to my house and a private company on top of that to be able to read the web, and another to host and another to have a name. I do not feel like paying yet another party just to connect to another computer on port 25. No, 1,000 times NO. Paying for each and every email I send would be like having the worst of all worlds for email.

Shame on anyone who thinks a novel system that extracts your money will do anything more than extract money in the long run. Rember paying the cable company for advert free TV? Now you simply pay for TV. Anyone who pays extra for email will simply pay extra for email. In the end, the company running the system will be bought and you will get your censored adverts.

The only real solution is to make spam against the law and fine those who send it. A fine on those who receive it is stupid.

Set up authentication

[Chemisor]

Most SMTP server can be set up to require authentication of the user; I think it should be possible to force each client to use only the from: address that it authenticated with.

Re:Set up authentication

[Miniluv]

Most ISPs require some form of authentication, either pop-before-smtp or smtp-auth. However neither of these is a terrible burden for spamming through an account. Changing accounts every week isn't a terrible burden either.

Most spam is never paid for. That's a fact of being an ISP, hosting provider, or email services provider. Even if you charge a CC before allowing the account to do anything, you're likely never going to see the money.

Charity stamps aren't going to stop it either, because most people are like me, and would flat our refuse to send email to people attempt to charge for "unknown senders". If I got that back I'd think "Fuck that" and move along. The people I email that I don't know? Usually prospective vendors who'd be losing out on my money. The people I receive email (non-spam) from who I don't know? Usually prospective customers who'd I be turning away. Doesn't seem real logical.

The only way spam will really end is if the market decides to stop responding to it entirely, at which point even a zero physical cost activity becomes pointless, because opportunity cost would be the dominant factor.

Just add a manidtory "Unsolicited" field to header

[Internet Dog]

A simplier solution, and one that doesn't require infrastructure change, is to require the addition of a field to the mail message header named "UnSolicited" for any unsolicited mail message. Any mail not properly marked would be considered a felony offense with a heavy fine and jail time.

It won't get rid of scam artists who use SPAM, but it will force legitimate businesses that send out SPAM to conform. If the field is present in the header then mail servers could scan the header prior to receiving the entire message. End users could instruct the mail server to selectively filter the SPAM based on the value present in the "UnSolicited" field.

Not if the SMTP server authenticates you.

[Chemisor]

Most SMTP servers are set up to allow connections from anybody as anybody. It is entirely possible to restrict connections to authorized users only, and it is technically possible (although I am not sure if it is implemented) to force from: addresses to the authorized user's identity. Most users send mail only as themselves. The exception is relay hosts, but those can be explicitly authorized, and you wouldn't want to allow your server to relay from a known spammer, would you?

Prior Art

[SpyderFan]

Is there prior art that would invalidate this patent?

I know there aren't a lot of Bill Gate's fans hanging out here, but what about The Road Ahead (copyright 1996) as prior art. I'm pretty sure the concept of paying per e-mail was mentioned in the book.

Maybe the EMail Stamp concept could be added to Spam Sleuth so it would work with all e-mail accounts, all clients, and all servers.

Who is going to collect the bills?

[AchilleTalon]

It is easy to imagine systems to charge someone, however, it is not as easy to imagine a way to collect the bills.

Considering most spam sending sites are out of control of anyone wishing to close them, I suppose it will be as difficult to collect the bills as it is to shutdown these e-pollution sites.

A-mazing compairison!

[twitter]

Bulk mail has different rates mostly because the sender pre-sorts the mail and saves some work for the postal-office. It has nothing to do with subsidizing, in fact bulk mail helps subsidize the post office.

Really? Would that be because people have gone to great lengths to get around the post office? The post office cut back it's service and prostituted itself to junk mail. You realize that the government could impose the sorting rules on large mailings and still charge the full postal rate? Did you know that the post used to be served three times a day in many places alowing real business to be conducted by it? Today, real mail takes too long and gets lost in crap that cheapens it's perception.

So what have people done to get around real mail? They pay a minimum of $30 a month for a phone line and $10 a month for dhcp web service. That's enough money to send 100 real letters. Yet this is what people prefer.

Now what is proposed as a solution to spam? Punish the spamers? No, some dumb dumbs have had the bright idea to punish the rest of us. No fucking way. Just outlaw spam and fine those who send it. We should not impose the limitations of the old system on the new.

A private company might have a go at serving mail, if and only if they provide an otherwise feeless access system to it, but that would be an entierly new system and similar have already failed.

SPAM is the price of email.

[GauFo]

The day they start charging per email, is the day slashdotters begin work on a free alternative.

I already pay for email

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but I already pay a "small fee" to send email. It's roughly equivalent to the amount I pay my ISP each month, divided by the number of total bytes I send or receive, times the number of bytes of email I send or receive.

Re:Use ASK (or TMDA, or...)

[d^2b]

TMDA (www.tmda.net) is pretty similar in spirit to ASK. But I actually use TMDA, so talk about it.

These problems can be solved by the use of tagged addresses, supported by sendmail, exim, qmail etc.

Basically you give your address as genius+dated+E7ABC@foo.com (instead of genius@foo.com), and tmda passes it on to you automatically until it times out (typically in a week).

Is it a bit of a hassle? Yeah.

Does it beat 100 spam messages a day? Also Yeah.

The technical hassle could be overcome by yet another mozilla hack to generate addresses on the fly much like my mail and news clients already do.

i was almost tempted to

[mincus]

use the numbered profit scheme, but instead Ill just explain what i want to setup. Block all email.

Anytime you receive a message, you dont see it, but a reply is sent to the sender with a link to a page to purchase access to you, ie - "Im sorry, but I have blocked all incomming email, if you would like me to see what you have sent me, please click on the link below and purchase X amount of views". Then they could purchase what basically amounted to stamps to send you X amount of messages. If they are just a bot, or a dead address, you would never know the better. When they completed the purchase, they would then be given a key etc etc. This would all run behind the scenes with your email client, and you would never see spam again unless you got paid to view it. Now i just need to stop being lazy and start implementing it...

Demographics / Bulk e-stamps

[linus_vp]

So, when I have a baby, how do the IRL spammers (junk mail companies) *find out* I've had one? My concern is that even with e-stamps, there will still be lots of spammers that abuse the email, and find ways to get 'bulk e-stamps' at a reduced rate.

Re:Demographics / Bulk e-stamps

[elmegil]

They find out because the hospital, or your health provider, or someone else in that chain has agreed to sell your information. Yes, I agree, that's a bad thing, but it's pretty difficult to find the exact culprit. And the good thing is, if you could find the culprit you could just "not get" the spam, because the IRL baby spammers aren't just dumping phone books and sending mail to randome people.

I smell an opportunity ...

[rodney dill]

... which means there are potential problems with this pay system. I may owe only a limited amount of money to a few people, and all the cumulative senders to me may only owe me a few bucks if I decided to collect. That means that there are probably millions of dollars to be collected overall. I some enterprising startup pays 10-25% to individuals for the right to collect on the Debts there is a lot of money to be had and a lot of incentive for someone to pursue it.

redicules

[uidzer0.org]

this is absolutly obserd. this would be an end to all newsgroups, non-spam mailing lists, etc... and the start of a whole new wold of problems caused by those that don't pay their email bill

Thank you

[Norge]

I read the pdf linked in the article and was excited, because this proposal seems like it might actually work. I checked out the responses and was very irritated to find that the vast majority of the posters were objecting to things that weren't even in the proposal. I haven't read slashdot much recently, and I can really see what people mean when they say it's going to hell in a handbasket.

(And hopefully someone responded to your previous post in exactly this way, creating an ultra-tiple-decker dup.)

Benjamin

Why charge anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this idea ranks in stupidity with micro payments. Pass law requiring spam to have a mimetype identifying as such or the spammer is fined. This will give clients plenty of oportunity to filter the spam. Spam will dramatically decrease because most or all people will filter it. Problem solved.

Maybe I'll get a PhD for this idea or a job at IBM.

Self Sorting

[siteTHREE]

Another way/reason the bulk senders save money is that they tend to sort the mail themselves before giving it to the postoffice. The postoffice then discounts the price for them.

(Please note that well I am only positive this happens in the UK, I am confident the same types of agreement would occur in other countries)

Anecdotal report on the effectiveness of SPAM

[geoswan]

99.99% percent of the recipients toss it without even looking at the content...

I can give a report on how ineffective SPAM must be.

Last December I found that a SPAM artist was using an old, inactive email address of mine, as the "Reply-to" field of some of their SPAM. I got a flood of bounce messages. At its height I was receiving 100 bounce messages per day.

I looked at every message associated with this SPAM. Only one single message was written by a real live human being.

How many SPAM messages got through, if I got 776 bounce messages? I dunno.

But the bounce messages were from a limited number of ISPs. I surmised that most ISPs mail servers can tell when a header is forged, and don't bother reporting non-delivery to a forged address. Some of the bounce messages reported dozens of bad addresses.

I am going to guess hundreds of thousands of SPAM went out.

If there are any potential SPAM artists out there, learn the lesson. Don't bother. Something like 99.99% of them get tossed without being read.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[Anonymous Coward]

So for each mass mailing of that size, the spammer is paying $5000. Currently a lot of the big guys are sending out over 10 million a week! Hello? That's a log of money!

I wish I had a log of money.

*sniff*

Hey. This might work.

[Iparadox]

If you have been missing the point, re-read the article. Do not let the government into this. It will be the camel's nose in the tent. There is absolutely no need to charge every email for transmission. I am already paying for that by using an ISP, thank you very much. Also, try looking at the statistics that have been posted on /. about the source of email addresses. Lame solution: Spammers get their addresses by scouring the web. If you are going to post an email address, post a forwarding address. Joe's Email forwarding will charge a tiny fee to forward ($.05). Joe's charges the sender, not you. If you reply, Joe's will fiddle your reply message and properly send the reply with Joe's address. The entire fee will be donated to the FSF. You can still use your own regular email for free (as in beer) communications with your friends. Hey. If somebody wants to send me Pr0n ads at a nickel a pop for the FSF, they can be my guest. It would tickle me pink to hit the delete key, every time. I just cannot figure out a simple way to charge ordinary folks a nickel. I do not think credit card fraud will be that much of a problem. The fundamental problem with spam is that it is *legal*. Any time Joe's Forwarding bounces a credit card number, they just send the notice to the FBI. Within a very short time, spammers using stolen credit cards will be serving very long sentences, and will have to stop spamming.

What about this?

[Cruciform]

Rather than trying to create a governing body to manage this internationally, what about an idea like the following:

Incorporate the ability to create a certificate on your own computer. This certificate can have an expiration date of your choosing... 1 day, 1 month, whatever. When your client receives mail that isn't certified, it send a copy of the current certificate to the sender. They can then email you until the certificate expires. The odd spammer will get through, but this would lower the effectiveness of spamming greatly because it would take time for them to build databases. And expiring certificates takes that time away from them. Plus, in order to get a certificate they'd need to send email from a real account. Certificates could always be bound specifically to the requested account for even more frustation at their end. Since spoofing wouldn't help them, they'd be more easily traced for legal action.

I'm sure there are holes in this idea, and I have no means of implementing this in any way myself. Is it practical to add a feature like this to an open source email client?

people with too much money

[Anonymous Coward]

what a horribly STUPID idea! we already pay for email through hosting and advertising costs. and people want to create an artificial additional charge???

What about charging for e-mail misses?

[ILuvSP]

OK, a large amount of spammers rely on *guessing* e-mail addresses. Why not charge per e-mail miss. I know, what about the guy who just mistypes a valid e-mail address. Have the ISP give out 10-20 free e-mail misses per month. This would more than cover any mistypes by us "normal" users while crippling the spammers who rely on guessing e-mail addresses.

My $0.02

ILuvSP

SPAM is a good tactic for destroying ....

[7dragon]

the openess of the internet.

My points:

1. Too many people are organizing and banding together, passing on information that disrupts the plans of the elite. Environmental issues, personal freedom, etc. For very little cost or through libraries ANYONE can have a say or pass information.
a. The elitists need to quash this source of disruption.
b. Fighting it directly will just feed it.
c. It must have a weakness.

2. SPAM appears to be the bane of the internet. Perhaps it would be a good tool of disruption(!)

3. People can be paid to send SPAM. They don't have to know the ultimate reason.

4. Who are the elite? Well, who gains the most from having control of the majority of people? Historically (post Moorish/Turkish Empire), Colleges and Universities have been the domain of wealthy European males. Wealth and Knowledge lead to POWER which is all that is needed to control people.

5. Now that the stage has been set with a problem that is universally despised, how wouldn't give anything to make the problem go away?

6.Most people are too weak-minded, selfish and short-term thinking to devise a way to solve the problem without giving up certain freedom. (Shades of the World Trade Center). Imposition of measures which began to deteriorate the openness and freedom of the internet begins apace. Everyone is on board because the problem finally goes away.

7. The easier solution of creating legislation which requires spammers to identify themselves so that they are open to lawsuits is too easy for the masses, will make the courts have more work and will keep the internet open. Why would the elite do that.

First asshole to mod this down is complicit in the arrangement.

The first thing that conspirators do is discredit the knowledgable as "conspiracy theorists".

Filtering works. If you're a "pro," learn it!

[aquarian]

Charging money for individual messages is a ridiculous idea. We have other spam solutions that work very well -- smart filters. If you're a mail admin, you need to get familiar with Spamassasin and other tools like it. They work. Personally, I use PopFilter on my laptop, and it works beautifully. I get 2-300 messages a day, of which about 5% are legit. PopFilter handles this flawlessly.

Re:Not much more! This is a bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

You've misunderstood the idea - you don't have to pay for any email you send if you are sending to someone who has you on their whitelist. And if you email someone for the first time, you only have to pay once if they add you to their whitelist.

An added benefit is, if you have a falling out with someone (old s.o.), you can remove them from your whitelist and make them pay to email you.

This is a good thing!

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[tarmo]

Use a filter to get rid of spam. I get around 20-100 spam mails per day, but using bogofilter it's all filtered away. I get around 1 false negative per week and no false positives.

These micropayments seem interesting, but are really useful for spam reduction for people that don't have the capabilities to use a content based spam filter.

Besides, many mailing lists and ISPs are starting to use spamassassin or other filters, to the spam problem may go away in time. Or not.

Re:Not much more! This is a bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

spam is a communal event. we all get the same spam at pretty much the same time from similar sources. being such a communal thing, it makes sense to use the communal aspect of it to get rid of it. for example : 1 mail server with 2000 recipients, if more than 10 % receive and delete/block said piece of spam, then it is identified as spam and removed from the remainder. this allows for for subgroups within the group to cleanse, in short order, the entire system. it does not affect newsletters or other internal mail and it's (the server/group) recommendations on what has been deleted can be forwarded to a neighboring group. the program for this could actually be pretty small. any comments? better still, any takers?

What about encryption?

[AxelTorvalds]

It's been like pulling teeth to get my friends and family to start using GPG/PGP. Why would they ever use a pay stamp?

There is a solution. Mailers that only propagate mail if it is signed by a trusted key.

Like the American Drug War

[WindBourne]

We outlaw all drugs, yet there is a push and pull (supply/demand) on drugs. Spam is the same way. Many companies that are pushing the spam are paying somebody else to do so. The more illegal that spam gets, the more offshore that it goes and the higher the costs to the company that wants it to be sent.
So far, all I can see winning this spam war is the the spammer, the company providing it, and the congress ppl who are being lobbied on both sides of the issues and taking monies from both side.
In fact, it really is identical to the drug war.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[Reziac]

We use a custom spamfilter on the BBS (written by the Real Sysop to work with Wildcat4), and it's nearly 100% effective. You can find it on the software page at http://eqcitybbs.tripod.com

I don't filter my Earthlink mail at all, and my real email still outnumbers spam by about 2-to-1 (I get 10-20 spams a day, including wandering copies of Klez and Bugbear -- but there are days when I get zero spam, and it's rarely enough to even get my attention). I don't post that address on usenet, but it IS by necessity plastered around my websites.

I *do* have a DEL key, and I know how to use it. :)

SASE: Self-Addressed Stamped "envelope" for email?

[Nonesuch]

All of the tough issues of implementing this are already implemented in existing public key encryption implementations and current PKI applications... certificates, certificate changes, revokation lists, expiration, etc etc.

How would a pay-per-email fee affect people like this? What about the "Forgot Your Password?" links on sites that email your registered email?

Easy. Add a field to the form, into which you paste your own "stamp" for the site to use on the email that is sent to you.

Same method could be used for those "mail this web page to a friend" links you find on CNet and the like. The concept is analogous to the "Self Addressed Stamped Envelope".

For a server that sends automated emails (e.g. weekly activity reports), you could provide a self-signed "reusable until revoked" certificate (aka "stamp") for all future emails.

The easiest way to do this would be for the web page to present you with a certificate naming their server and sending domain or full email address. you would "sign" this certificate with your personal email key, then paste the signed certificate back to the form and submit.

If the site "goes bad" and starts spamming you, you have the option to revoke the certificate.

NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

any estamp like infrastructure will make it much much easier for governments to TAX each and every email.

We don't want to make it easier for any government to create new taxes.

Taxes never go away...just look at th 3% federal tax on your phone bill which was a 'temporary' tax to pay for the Spanish American war in 1893.

Correction, 2003-1893 == 110 years is temporary considering the newest copyright extensions in place.

nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of problems where useful work occurs that can be easily checked. for example, sorting a list. computing a train/airline routing schedule.

or if you want pure problems, send them three problems, two are useful, one is one you already know the answer too.

The stupidest thing ever

[autopr0n]

The solution to Spam is to require 'human-verification' of senders before accepting mail from them.

The first time someone emails you, have them look at a picture of words, or even just have them reply to a validation email. (or allow them to reply if you email them, otherwise this system would never work :P)

Any solution that requires other people to change their software to email you is not going to work. And I'm certainly not going to pay any money to email someone. A few people might, but the vast majority won't. This system would do far worse with false positives then any filter. And it wouldn't do any better at all then requiring a simple digital signatures anyway!

By the way, one interesting thing about this technology, If it became widespread, it would change society a little. People would solicit email from people to get the cash. If you charged 5, and got 1k emails a day, that would be $50/day or $18,000/year. I could so see people running popular websites asking people to email them to support the site, rather then (or in addition to) advertisements or conventional donations.

Re:The stupidest thing ever

[stand]

Any solution that requires other people to change their software to email you is not going to work. And I'm certainly not going to pay any money to email someone. A few people might, but the vast majority won't. This system would do far worse with false positives then any filter. And it wouldn't do any better at all then requiring a simple digital signatures anyway!

The system doesn't require other people to change their software to email you. They simply have to provide a token (that they purchase from you via a third party) in plain text in the body of the message. Unless they do so, their message never sees your inbox and their email bounces. If they do purchase a token and can convince you that their message isn't spam, you stop the charge and they get a free path to your inbox. It's brilliant , really.

I don't think the estam will make a diference

[rbgnr111]

most of the spammers have a large budget behind them to send out all the mail.
I still lean towards the best solustions being things like rbl databases.
I know I cut the amount of spam I get on my site by well over 90% when I used a combination of
rbl queries, mailscanner, spamassassin, razor, and dcc.

This is an OK idea, not a great one.

[gurps_npc]

1) It would significantly cut down on the spam, but not kill it completely. It would in fact be far better than some of you think, because about 70% of spam is actually an advertisement on how to become a SPAMMER. (Pretty much every single "get rich quick", "work from home", and "are you computer literate" offer is actually a ponzi scheme of "Pay me money and I will tell you how to spam people like I did to you." ) If you put in even a 1 cent cost per hundred emails, this scheme dies.

2) There are many perfectlly good means of killing all spam. Here is one:

A) get an email program that has both a filter and an auto reply function.

B) Set up a filter. If an email comes in that does not have the word "maps" (Spam backwards) or some other code word in the Subject line, your filter i. appends an instruction to your recepient to use that code word, ii. autoreplies to that sender, and iii. deletes the email. Spammers can NOT afford the time to deal with any replies.

C) If your buddies also do a similar thing, you might get caught in a loop. To deal with this you can have the auto-filter insert your code word to the subject line before you reply. The only problem might develop is if the spammers started using an auto-reply function of their own (A highly unlikely event in my mind).

This simple system kills all spam going into your mailbox today. It does cause minor inconveince to people trying to mail stuff to you as they have to remember to input your code word. But their inconveinence is less than you having to delete 1,000 junkmail from your inbox every other day.

hundreds of megs a month?

[portscan]

I suspect that the reason you get so much spam is that your email address is so prominently displapyed on the internet. What else could one expect?

I have had the same email address for 3+ years now and I average less than one piece of spam per month. I have a separate free email account that I use for ecommerce transactions and to give out to websites. Even it gets a minimal amount of spam.

I would be outraged having to pay to send email. People should just be responsible with their addresses and not give their primary email out to every webiste on the internet. That would solve the spam problem quite well.

Maybe I'm not understanding something here...

[mark-t]

But how hard would it be for ISP's to blacklist "open relays"? So that if anything in the email headers indicates that it *EVER* has passed through an open relay system, then the email gets rejected. Further, if the mail is actually coming from any system OTHER than what the topmost "received" header says, the email would also get rejected. I would suspect that this rejection would probably have to amount to discarding the email rather than bouncing it, because the sender's address cannot be confirmed, and trying to bounce each one would create a network traffic problem.

hashcash anyone?!

[Anonymous Coward]

why charge in dollars when one can easily charge in cpu cycles? hello!? wake up!

no, I understand.

[twitter]

you say You've misunderstood the idea - you don't have to pay for any email you send if you are sending to someone who has you on their whitelist. And if you email someone for the first time, you only have to pay once if they add you to their whitelist.

The details of my punishment do not concern me as much as the net result. Right now I don't have to pay anything to send mail. Nor do I have to maintain another list or login or whatever. So the net result is that I get to pay for what I do freely now. No thanks, I'd rather make comercial unsolicited email against the law and fine people who send it.

Re:no, I understand.

[stand]

The details of my punishment do not concern me as much as the net result. Right now I don't have to pay anything to send mail. Nor do I have to maintain another list or login or whatever. So the net result is that I get to pay for what I do freely now. No thanks, I'd rather make comercial unsolicited email against the law and fine people who send it.

NO! You are mischaracterizing the article. Please, please go read it before commenting further. This is the most well articulated scheme I've ever seen. It deserves better than this perfunctory brush-off.

Re:no, I understand.

[twitter]

This is the most well articulated scheme I've ever seen. It deserves better than this perfunctory brush-off.

You have not seen many schemes, have you? Did you even read this one?

Re:no, I understand.

[stand]

Umm...yes. And I have seen a lot of schemes. This is the only one I've ever seen that nicely addresses all the usual objections everyone always raises around here. That's what I mean when I say "well articulated." Have you read the article or are you just engaging in idle accusations?

Why reinvent the well?

[kesler]

Why not use the enforcement that is already in place? Just forward your spam to UCE@FTC.GOV and let the government go attack the spammers?

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/spam/index .h tml

https://rn.ftc.gov/dod/wsolcq$.startup?Z_ORG_COD E= PU01
If you have a specific complaint about unsolicited commercial e-mail (spam), use the form below. You can forward spam directly to the Commission at UCE@FTC.GOV without using the complaint form.

Re:Why reinvent the wheel?

[kesler]

D'oh...it's wheel not well

How to make this work...

[clambake]

Instead of some central "Post Office" body that you pay, the money should go directly to the recipient of the message. People would actually WANT spam.

Scott's previous invention

[leighklotz]

Scott invented :-) so maybe his computational challenge idea will gain wide acceptance as well.

RTFA!!!

[stand]

Reading all the comments here makes me think that this is the worst case of people not reading the article before posting that I've ever seen. All of the concerns expressed here are addressed. This one is worth taking the time on, trust me.

Won't work...

[CaptainTux]

Spammers are getting more sophisticated in their never ending attempt at avoiding detection and having their service shut off. Most spammers these days don't use their own ISP to send mail and prefer to send through "anonymous proxies" that are usually misconfigured mail servers in different parts of the world. Charging per email would only prevent legitimate users from sending email because it could become cost prohibitive. Spammers, on the other hand, wouldn't be stopped at all. Get real!

Re:Not much more! This is a bad idea.

[bbc22405]

This is a bad idea. [blahblahblah]

Whatever idea you're blathering about, it's clearly not the one described in the article(s). RTFA!

Not At All Like the American Drug War

[Steve B]

In fact, it really is identical to the drug war.

Nope. In an illegal drug transaction, neither the buyer nor the seller wants official attention, so the authorities have to go to great lengths to detect, much less suppress, the activity. In spamming, the recipient wants the cops to catch the perpetrator (and maybe bend the Eighth Amendment just a wee bit), so the evidence will be readily available to anybody making a credible attempt to crack down on spam theft.

what the heck you talking about?

[zogger]

--you take double grumpy pills this morning? I didn't say I don't use email,nor recommend that people don't use email, not even close, I just dropped off some lists I was on, both from not really using them and also from the obvious massive spam increases I got. I am reasonably careful on how I give my email out now, as well. Just normal common sense useages, and as a result I still communicate with people I want to, and get the same business emails I always got, but only a few spams per day, very easy to deal with. considering I used to get like dozens and dozens, I think my crude technique worked fairly well.

MY over-all solution to spam? Make it illegal, even if it's a UN thing, much as I don't like the UN for most purposes, for things like that it might actually be useful. Once it's illegal all over the planet it might work better, and any tiny nations that keep it "legal" can just be blocked by people if it gets to that. Personally I would have no problem whatsoever if my ISP blocked entire nations or domains if that was possible and they had a request thing for that, that any user could simply notify them. Commercial unsolicited mail should really be opt-in, not phony opt-in, no forged headers or return-tos. I say treat forged headers and phony return-to addys as fraud, wirefraud, a federal felony, which is what they are. Then they need as much po-leece effort and general press efforts as they are putting into "cracking down on P2P sharers". Governments always having this "war" on this or that, tell ya what, compared to all the other "wars" I'd say a "war on spam" would garner 99.999% planetary support against the "email spam terrorists". It won't stop all of it, but it will stop a lot of it. No one wants to pay per email, neither the senders nor the recipients. No one really wants the wasted bandwith except for those few jerk hosting places that sell space and bandwith to spammers, who SHOULD be universally shunned and blocked by people.

That pay per view e-mail nonsense just ain't gonna fly, so the main premise of the article is seriously flawed. It would be like going back to pay by the minute internet, yeech. Well, maybe some corporations might for their "official" email, but I can't see many individuals all eager to sign up for it. That and more research and adoption of these various spam filters, make them just much easier to use.

Maybe slashdot should run a poll, who would pay to send or receive email? I doubt many people would, but it would be interesting to see the results.

Yes it would

[Stroman Rebar]

Spam is a numbers game. From the reports that I have read, the total cost for sending out a big batch of spam, say half a million addresses, is about $3000 US. The profit by the spammer on one of those batches can average anywhere from -$1000 to + $2000. Now, if each one of those addresses cost a penny, $0.01, to reach, Mr. casio says it would cost $10,000 for that batch of spam.

That my friend would be the death of the current spammer buisness model. Yes, you would still get targeted adds, but in smaller numbers, and maybe, just maybe, for something you might be interested in seeing.

Of course, that would be just until some 733t h@xor figures a way around the collection scheme. But we can all dream, can't we?

Classes of email

[CrankinOut]

I think of email as falling into the following classes:

(a) sources I know

(b) sources I don't know but not spam

(c) spam

The difference I note is that the first two people are not deceptive in their point of origin. If there were a Mail Transport Agent that could, upon connection with SMTP, use the from field and Received field to verify that the originating system has the from address on it, and could then mark the mail "Certified", that would go a long way towards giving the control to the recipient to deal with the content.

To implement this would require the efforts of the honest sources, and would let honest sources decide if and when they wanted to deploy. It would also eliminate the deceptive practice of source routing to use a weakly secured system as a reputable source.

I haven't really thought this out in depth, but I think determining the principles by which good sources can certify their emails is the way to go.

bullshit

[pair-a-noyd]

*I* am *NOT* going to pay extra to send email.
I say *SHOOT* spammers in the head on national television. ALL CHANNELS without exception, FORCE everyone to watch PUBLIC EXECUTIONS.

"We interupt this broadcast for the public execution of a spammer"

Within a week ALL spam will cease to exist...

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[rutledjw]

You know what's really pathetic? I "previewed" that post _3_ times, only to catch "log" instead of "lot" AFTER I hit "submit"...

Fuck That

[capitalsucks]

Fuck That. I don't see how that would accomplish anything but take us one step closer to internet fascism.

Spam Solution

[PingPongBoy]

The best way to solve the spam problem is

you spammers get a clue

go do something useful with your lives

sell me something i want

i'm too desensitized for your porn

let's rephrase that a bit...

[Anonymous Coward]

"As crappy as it sounds, putting spammers to death would cut spam dramatically."

I already pay for my Internet connection -- why should I have to pay more? Keep that up and you'll see Internet bills like phone bills: 10 pages of line-item bullshit, every month.

Spammers use other peoples resources, and most spam messages are deceptive (fake return addresses and headers). Why is it so hard for elected representatives to understand? Spam should be illegal, just like junk faxes and false advertising.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[skip lewis]

what's REALLY pathetic is that you have no concept of, uh, what's that word again? uh, oh yeah, MATH!

if the spammer gets a one percent response rate (not unreasonable) on a product that nets him just ten dollars... let's see...

1,000,000 spams * $.005= $5,000 cost

1% response of 1,000,000= 10,000 bites

10,000 bites * ten dollars each= you do the MATH

kneebiter rutle

Hotmail security feature

[Anonymous Coward]

The first time I cleared my 11 yr-olds email account at hotmail, I wasn't surprised to see that 90% of it was porn. So I changed the security features on the account to only allow mail from those in her address book, which cut out all the unsolicited stuff. Isn't that essentially the same thing? Why would you have to put together a payment scheme.

False solution

[dfnr2]

The problem with this solution is that it doesn't affect the spammers at all. This is essentially a whitelist with potential to "redeem" unsolicited email. It is implemented as a buffer between the server and the mail reader. Spammers can continue to inundate the net with their sea of output, which will wash upon the "shores" of mail servers, with "stamp" subscribers insulated, along with other whitelist and blacklist users. Much of the spam still gets through.

The only real solution is a "token" system which retains the email content on the originating mail server, passing a token to the recipient, which responds with a "send" or "refuse" token. This can be augmented with whitelists to simplify the transaction for expected emails, with minimal inconvenience and resource use for unexpected mail. For example, you see a token from a verified address, with brief header, in your mailbox, click "read", and the message is instantly requested and retrieved from the originators server.

Of course, this will require revamping of the email infrastructure, including mods to MTA's and MUAs

Why not just implement a whitelist?

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't let ANYBODY pay to bypass it. Bam. Spam problems solved, no money changes hands, everybody happy.

Implement an additional protocol where people can send you an email address and a short description to request admission to your white list. Limit these to say 100 chars so that nobody can really use whitelist requests as advertising. Have the whitelist software check all received addresses for validity by autosending a response.

Obviously not that effective for an email account where you might WANT to receive mail from strangers, but great for personal accounts. I mean, how do you usually get a friend's, a relative's, or a business acquaintance's email address anyway? Over the phone, in person, on a business card etc., so big deal if we add the whitelist request step to the transaction.

For accounts where you might want strangers to send, how about a web page to submit whitelist requests. On the page the user would see a keyphrase represented in a PNG or JPEG. The user would have to type in that passphrase to the web page to generate a whitelist request. This way while not exactly eliminating whitelist requests from spammers they would be limited to those with the patience to hunt for whitelist request pages and actually type pass phrases.

Re:Summary: Get paid for accepting unsolicited ema

[rutledjw]

LOL, OK then, tell me where you get the 1% and the $10 / hit...

Magic numbers? Go do some research to back up your MATH and I'll listen. I don't remember ever reading anywhere those 2 returns. 1% is high and $10? Are you kidding?

Don't flame, try to back it up. I eagerly await silence...

Last Post!

[alpg]

Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic
formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific
mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned
with what ____does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been
so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further
here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically,
discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical,
and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent,
but each nonexisted in an entirely different way ...
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...