Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
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.
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.
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
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.
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.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
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.
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.
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.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
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.
... something doesn't sound right.
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
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
think of how much you would get if sending junk mail was free
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.
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.
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.
bance.net
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.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
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.
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?
/. finds me to be 20% Troll, 80% Funny
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.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
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.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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
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.
That was classic intercourse!
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.
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.