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

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?

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...)