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.
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.
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?
-- Bill "Houdini" Weiss
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 ?
think of how much you would get if sending junk mail was free
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.
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?
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.
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...)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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.