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

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.

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)?

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.

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.

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: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: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.

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: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: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.

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.

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.