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

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.

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.

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...