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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.
Why pay for some type of filter when SpamAssassin is free (as in speech)?
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.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
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.
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.
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.
Developers: We can use your help.
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?
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.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
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.
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
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."
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
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...
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
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.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.
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).
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Check out Cringley's recent article. Says basically the same thing, I believe.
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!
"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