E-mail Tax As Way Of Preventing Spam

scubacuda writes "This FT article criticizes current attempts to regulate spam. Re: Lessig's bounty-on-spammer proposal: 'This is a terrible idea that will make millionaires of two classes of people: reprobates who illegally maraud through others' hard drives; and those who have built their expertise about spam by peddling it, 'He considers the recent FTC spam conference "barking up the wrong tree," and thinks that the simplest way to regulate spam is through a tax: 'This requires smashing some myths....But, very soon, the Internet should turn into a penny post, with a levy of 1 cent per letter. This would cost the average e-mailer about $10 a year. Small companies would pay bills in the hundreds of dollars; very large ones in the thousands. And spammers would be driven to honest employment. The tax could be made progressive by exempting, say, those who sent fewer than 5,000 letters a year. The proceeds could go to maintain and expand bandwidth.'"

Comments

Is taxation best?

[blueidoru]

However, if ISPs are the ones paying for bandwidth... how would a "tax" help, per se? Should ISPs charge for email? And, if so, won't spammers overseas still get away with things? (Actually, with taxes, they do too.)

Re:Is taxation best?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey we tax cigarettes to help fund anti-smoking programs and pay for lung cancer treatment. Right? HaHa, and the email tax will go to ISPs. We're really funny today.

We should tax marijuana sales to fund detox centers. We can put a payroll tax on all illegals who work in restaurants and crop fields to fund unemployment for citizens.

By the way, we really do tax marijuana and if you pay the tax, it's legal to possess it. It's just that there's no mechanism to collect it and no gov't agent will accept payment. Minor point of law.

Re:Is taxation best?

[banzai51]

It wouldn't. But the government could finally cash in on the internet. Its all in our best interests of course.

Re:Is taxation best?

[banzai51]

For the humor impaired: that last sentence was dripping with sarcasm.

Re:Is taxation best?

[vadermax]

cccp, here we come! :) no, I mean, we should seek those spammers, with baseballbats instead! that would be the "right" thing to do.. though, from a enviromental point of view, I guess it's better to spam the email, than mail anyway.. i'd rather have my mail free, and with the isp letting someone spam me, for say, valium or some other drug.. (wonder why they always spam me with that!!?? that, and naked woman.. :) ah, well spam, apparently you can't live without it.. tax, you can live without! Br, seb

Re:Is taxation best?

[whereiswaldo]

I think turning to the law is the wrong place to look for a solution. Plenty of ideas have been thought of to limit spam, and more will come. Let the market decide. We have way too many laws as it is. In fact, shouldn't there come a point when we don't need NEW laws?

Re:Is taxation best?

[LordKane]

Your already paying the ISP to use their services. The issue currently is that there is to much abuse for that fee to be enough in some cases. A tax, were it to actually end up being followed and effective, would severely reduce the number of abuse cases done to local ISPs. The ISPs monthly fee would actually cover most costs, and you have generated another revenue stream that could be dished out to needy portions of the net, as well as a small bit back to ISPs.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Jaysyn]

Why does the U.S. government insist on insinuating itself into every aspect of my life? I really don't want to pay $.01 for every email I send to get rid the 4-10 pieces of I get a day (and subseqently get rid of before I look at them with MailWasher).

The fee will start out small at a penny, but the cost *will* go up. Just like every other service ever thought up by the U.S. government. Eventually will be paying per MB for email like we do with snail mail.

Well I guess if this happens, people will start using & spamming IM more. Wonder what will happen then?

Jaysyn

Re:Is taxation best?

[LordKane]

Hmm, perhaps to clarify a bit. A fee of some sort would be a good idea. It does not have to be a goverment imposed tax, as we all know how much they enjoy raising costs drasticly over time (*ahem* post office *ahem*), but some sort of fee from some body that could enforce it. And maybe not a penny, but some (monetary cost) per (measurable unit). Include a lower bounds on this, so common users would not end up paying anything, such as the suggested less than 5000 email a year.

Re:Is taxation best?

[sacherjj]

I would gladly pay $0.01 per email to get rid of the 50-70 SPAM messages I get per day. Unfortunately, this really can't work until there is a good way of authenticating the sender.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Anonymous Coward]

Taxing the internet, in any form, is an extremely bad idea. Besides, how would you enforce such a tax? Anyone with a good deal of computer knowledge would be able to use a 3rd party program specifically made to circumvent that Tax to continue spamming, possibly even through a proxy server in another country (that can send free emails) So, as far as anyone would know, I could be Hose from Brazil using my self-made spamming program to advertise in your email accounts about viagra...

Re:Is taxation best?

[u-235-sentinel]

The government doesn't do anything that's entirely in our best interest. It has to be in their best interest. No... not trolling simply think about it. Many times I've read how laws the voters put into place were deemed unconstitutional or some other reason was used NOT to implement it despite the voters demand.

Oh and btw, many of these laws were beneficial to the voters. Really good ideas that simply never took off due to lack of government interest. California for example passed a law many years ago that is still in courts. Basically denying medical or other government services to illegal aliens. It was never implemented as I understand. It was a good idea with over 80% voting yes. So much for our best interest.

BTW, as far as email spam goes, why not just make that illegal rather than taxing spammers. After all... it should be illegal. I think it safe to say that most spammers send out more than 5,000 email's a year. Perhaps setting that as a top limit of what defines a person as a spammer. Just a thought

Re:Is taxation best?

[Evil Adrian]

I don't know if you're ever heard of inflation. As currency loses its value, you're forced to charge more to get the same level of income.

So your dig at the post office is *ahem* without merit *ahem*.

Re:Is taxation best?

[spells]

Rather that using the stick, why doesn't the government try using a carrot? Create a better mail protocol and insist that businesses that deal with the govenrment must use the new protocol for email. My bet is that it would quickly become integrated into mail servers and users would never know.

Re:Is taxation best?

[svoid]

Sure, I suggest this over a year ago and get moderated down to a '1'. Someone else suggests it, and it gets its own article on Slashdot.

Re:Is taxation best?

[LordKane]

True, inflation causes prices to rise. But my "dig", as you put it, was not at the basic inflation inherent in an economy. It's the fact that the Post Office is the only profit making entity in the government, and that other government bodies skim some of that profit to help cover their costs, until that profit is gone and then some. The post office keeps raising it's prices to keep up with this. Do you really think all the recent increases in postage have been because of inflation? Another government controled money maker like an email tax would be would certainly be just as abused as a the our postal systems profits have been.

Re:Is taxation best?

[orangesquid]

Plus, this would kill (without special exemptions and such):
* Mailing lists
* Free web->mail, ftp->mail, and news->mail gateways
* Free webmail and personal mail servers run off of DSL (now we will be e-mailing our friends every time we switch ISPs or our ISPs get bought out and change domain names... which will cost us!)
* E-mail query systems ... probably other things too?

Re:Is taxation best?

[The_K4]

Ok, there's a 5000 e-mail limit. Amazon.com is now a spammer if all they ever send out is order confirmation and tracking e-mails. A bank that provides on-line banking would be a spammer if they send out e-mail confirmations of on-line transactions. It's not as simple to use "quantity" of e-mails as a spam/no spam test.

Re:Is taxation best?

[nsanit]

I think it safe to say that most spammers send out more than 5,000 email's a year. Perhaps setting that as a top limit of what defines a person as a spammer. Just a thought

The problem with giving the 'spammer' label to anyone who sends 5000 (or any arbitrary number) is that you will label people sending legitmate emails that are easily at or above that number.

My business partners and I share, via email, anything that is safe to be emailed. We even invoice our customers via email. On a slow day, the company sends 30 emails per day (not counting internal messages)...if we only work 300 days per year (yeah right), our company is sending 9000 legit emails per year. How can you call that spam (other than the fact that nobody really wants to be sent an invoice of any kind, it's still not unsolicited)? Could you imagine what kind of email traffic *LARGE* corporations have between each other? MY guess is it beats your limit on a weekly basis, if not daily.

I agree with you that spam should just be made illegal, outright - I can only dream of that happening to snail mail junk too. The question of defining spam/spammers and the enforcement of any regulation/law (my own draconian urgings aside) is something that needs to be addressed by the 'experts'.

Re:Is taxation best?

[The_K4]

Not only that, but I can see it now....the digital equalilant of "Postage Due". :( I can see iot now: You have $300 in outstanding postage due for these marketing mass mails that you "requested" your e-mail account is now frozen

Re:Is taxation best?

[u-235-sentinel]

Suggestions then?

Re:Is taxation best?

[banzai51]

I wouldn't say the govn't ALWAYS does things not in our best interest. The purpose of taxes is to run the govn't and provide public services. In the case of taxing email, the govn't isn't really going to provide a new service for us, they are porposing a new revenue stream to fund other projects. If they were going to use the money to say, run fiber to my door, I'd be more sympathetic. But I'd still be doubtful of their ability to produce. In the end this is just a trail ballon for a large money grab, no matter how impossible the implimentation might be.

Our best interests are not always popular.

Re:Is taxation best?

[u-235-sentinel]

Problem is I'm not a customer of 99.99999% of the email "corps" I receive an email from. Your email would be considered appropriate.

Perhaps something like the new do not call list made available to spammers. If something like that were implemented then it would decrease the number of messages being sent in a snap.

Re:Is taxation best?

[jezor]

banzai51 wrote:

" It wouldn't. But the government could finally cash in on the internet. Its all in our best interests of course."

Um, which government? As much as I will argue against the notion of the Internet as a lawless environment, the bottom line is that it is without borders, and spammers will easily be able to find an offshore haven from which to send their sexual enhancement ads. To assume that a US or UK law charging a per e-mail tax will somehow eliminate spam is unrealistic and unworkable. It will also significantly reduce the incentive to use e-mail for appropriate means, such as operating an e-mail discussion list.
Professor Jonathan I. Ezor
Director, Touro Institute for Business, Law and Technology
jezor@tourolaw.edu

Re:Is taxation best?

[hackstraw]

Should ISPs charge for email? Yes, they already do. Should their be a tax on email? No, this is rediculous. If their was a percieved need to have pay by mail, then it would already exist. There are pay websites, right? Plus it would be way to hairy with interstate/international regulations. I think that if everyone deleted spam instead of reading/following the liks inside of it, then it would go away on its own.

Re:Is taxation best?

[fataugie]

Jaysyn, you are fucking brilliant! If I had mod points, I would mod you up.

The income tax started the same way. "Oh, just the millionairs will pay". Fast forward to today, and what's the outcome? If they (pick a government, any government) manage to implement an e-mail tax....just wait. Next, it will be "we need to raise the tax to pay for insert favorite pork barrel project here.

You know and I do that if they can get this past the gag factor of the internet users, it will not stay a penny....I will bet my balls on it.

Re:Is taxation best?

[euvitudo]

I don't think the government would "finally cash in". The money will probably go to the dying monopoly of that market, i.e., the USPS. Or maybe the RIAA could get their hands on it by whining that people send mp3s by email. Or maybe the MPAA could "benefit" because someone is sending movies over email. Or maybe.........

Yah.. sure.. it will benefit government... just like cigarette tax benefits the government already. Uh-huh, sure... ;-)

Re:Is taxation best?

[hesiod]

> we really do tax marijuana and if you pay the tax, it's legal to possess it.

Do you have any reliable references to this?

Re:Is taxation best?

[hesiod]

> more than 5,000 email's a year. Perhaps setting that as a top limit

What about people who run listservs? Would they be charged once to send a mail to 500 thousand others, or would they have to pay $5,000 every time they sent a mailing?

No, taxes on Email in any way bastardizes what the 'net is, even if it removes one problem -- it just creates another. Plus, if the originating server is out of the country, or untraceable, the tax does nothing but cost honest people money. It's a terrible idea any way you cut it.

Re:Is taxation best?

[u-235-sentinel]

I hear yah. Perhaps a do no call list such as what the FCC is starting up for telemarketers?

Re:Is taxation best?

[gurps_npc]

So they charge each person $4/year to be on their list, redo their service to send a single email once per day and wallah they are done.

Or far more likely, they redo their wastefull service which sends COPIES of the same message to thousands of people with a bulletin board where people log on with a web browser and read the emails there. These crappy little things are BAD ideas of sending out massive emails - it worked fine for when the internet was a primitive thing and no one had any idea how to make a web page but tradition and the lack of thinking is the only thing having people do it that way instead of an obviously more efficent message board method.

This is a FANTASTIC idea that totally solves one problem without putting any real blockage.

People are CERTAINLY willing to pay a low amount of cash As in 1 cent per email, to forever be free of the JUNK that clutters their email.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. The choice is free email as is with spam or the MINOR inconveince

Re:Is taxation best?

[mdinowitz]

I run a number of mailing lists and on a good day can send out a million messages. This is all for community support with no profit at all on my side. A law like this would kill me and every other community supporter who supplies such a service.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Draigon]

Why pay a tax for people to chase after spam when you can pay a tax for people to create a smarter protocol?

What is needed is a new protocol and this has already been talked about. If I knew more about who was developing it I wouldn't mind donating.

Re:Is taxation best?

[rutledjw]

Make it illegal to:

• Hide of misconstrue you're e-mail address ("From:" field)
• Invalidate ANY business transactions initiated on e-mail communication with an hidden or incorrect "From:" field
• Require that ALL business oriented e-mail have contact information (name, address, e-mail, phone) valid for 90 days

There you go. They have to communicate through a REAL address, they have to tell you WHO they are, any business transactions not following this procedure are invalid (you can't collect money). If spammers do that, they can be blocked. You can add a national "opt-out" list at that point.

For international SPAMMERS, they simply can't collect money. How will people object to those types of charges? Tell your credit card company the transaction took place violating one of those rules and the transaction isn't valid. The spammer has to prove it was.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Anonymous Coward]

Taxation is idiotic. Not to mention, unfair. How does this prevent spam from outside of the United States - which is where most spam comes from?

I run a non-commercial website that sends out a ton of emails per year. It is an auction site, of sorts, and system-delivered email messages are IMPERITIVE to the success of auctions. Between outbid, sold, first bid, account authorization and other notices, my system probably sends out about 300,000 messages per year just by itself. That doesn't count the email sent out personally by me to correspond with users. And doesn't even count my personal email. Or my work email.

And remember, this is all non-business. I'm not making or attempting to make any money here. It's just for fun. A taxation wouldn't hurt private individuals or massive corporations. It would only hurt those inbetween. For example, eBay wouldn't be hurt and my granny wouldn't be hurt - but in the middle, where I'm a free eBay competitor - I would be very very very hurt.

Even if the taxation was 1/10th of a cent, that's $300/year to handle just my auction email notices. That's insane.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Nexx]

So instead of being sent 1k emails, you log on to download a 1k article. TANSTAAFL. Bandwith will get eaten *somewhere*.

And now, instead of having email sent to you, you pull the content list many times a day, often finding nothing new. No thank you, I don't have the time to check something many times a day.

You're being extraordinarily arrogant when you map your own world-view on to others. I am NOT willing to pay, on top of bandwith I already pay for, to send email. I get VERY LITTLE spam, and if you're getting spam, you either 1) don't know how to guard your email address, or 2) need to invest in spam-blocking systems.

My choice is quite clear. Yours?

Re:Is taxation best?

[ukyoCE]

I've heard this too actually, though I don't know the details. It was something like they made it illegal to possess(or was it sell?) marijuana without a special stamp, then they (intentionally i'm sure) made no way for people to get the stamps.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Eristone]

Interesting. And how do I access this wonderous bulletin board via my blackberry? Or my cell phone? You know - the things with crappy web browsers and horrible interfaces for selecting links? Or suppose I have access to a slow dialup line? (Like I did in the Philippines a few years back) - I can manually type in all the neat POP3 commands to scan my mail via a telnet session.. but getting a page rendered and deciphering that?

Your solution to lists doesn't address how your users may access the data. You shooting for a career in management? :)

Re:Is taxation best?

[banzai51]

That's part of what I was getting at. But that would be immaterial for the US govn't if they could reliably tax the majority of US emails. The point for the govn't is to create a new revenue stream, not to provide us spam protection. Once they started billing, the govn't would never stop.

We could get into a discussion on how to structure it to tax mostly spammers, but that defeats the purpose of the proposal. Spammers are a red herring.

For the truely paranoid: The govn't impliments this and has to count your emails. So they require all ISPs to install Carnavor style systems. Since they're counting the emails anyway, why not just snoop them while they're at it? So now we would be paying the govn't to read our email. :-)

Re:Is taxation best?

[GreyPoopon]

I can only dream of that happening to snail mail junk too.

The difference here, of course, is that junk snail mail has to be paid for by the sender, and you can still ask your post office not to delivery any to you.

If, instead of making spam illegal, we could sign some rules into law and enforce them, the problem would go away. A separate delivery class for junk mail would be great, especially if I could ask my provider to trash anything in the "spam" delivery class. Unfortunately, tracking down the offenders is sometimes difficult and expensive.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Darmox]

actually, it's illegal to possess, but if you do possess it, you still have to have the stamps for it, or it can also be tax evasion.

Specific to kansas, but there are other similar ones:
http://www.ksrevenue.org/perstaxtypesdrug.h tm

so basically, you can buy these tax stamps on it, but it's still illegal to own, and I suppose you're more or less admitting to possession by doing this...

From said page:

Drugs seized without stamps or having expired stamps may result in criminal or civil penalties which may include fines, seizure of property or liens against real estate.

A dealer is not required to give his/her name or address when purchasing stamps and the Department is prohibited from sharing any information relating to the purchase of drug tax stamps with law enforcement or anyone else.

Re:Is taxation best?

[GreyPoopon]

Sure, I suggest this over a year ago [slashdot.org] and get moderated down to a '1'. Someone else suggests it, and it gets its own article on Slashdot.

You were just ahead of your time. Next time, post ideas you though of a year ago. :-)

Re:Is taxation best?

[autopr0n]

our company is sending 9000 legit emails per year.

Well, that would only be $90/year under this scheme. Not to much money, although I do agree this scheme is idiotic.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Ian Jefferies]

Ok, there's a 5000 e-mail limit. Amazon.com is now a spammer if all they ever send out is order confirmation and tracking e-mails.

I think that misses the point, doesn't it? A 5000 e-mail limit isn't the definition of a spammer, just the exemption point so that there's no need to charge the majority of single users of e-mail. Large business should have the customer base to be able to afford to pay the excess charge (it becomes a business cost that they have to factor in).

Personal taxation works in a similar fashion: a cut off point at which it isn't worth chasing after the small fry (even though their contribution would still be significant when added together).

It's not as simple to use "quantity" of e-mails as a spam/no spam test.

I agree with this point about quantity of e-mail alone not being a measure of the spamminess... some of it is actually requested or expected by the user. It's just so damn hard in the e-mail protocol to distinguish between what the user asked for and what a spammer says the user asked for. It just highlights how difficult it is to define and fix the problem this way.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Anonymous Coward]

But ultimately email is not free -- it costs the recipient, as well as those who run the servers that relay it. So you are being subsidized, I would guess involuntarily, by the million persons each day that receive your emails, plus those that host the mail servers that relay all those messages. The penny-per-message fee would (if the proceeds were properly applied) quite properly reimburse those who are now footing the bill for your "community support" emails.

By the way, you are a bit vague about just what it is that you do, i.e. "run a number of mailing lists." Care to clarify?

Re:Is taxation best?

[srmalloy]

As much as I will argue against the notion of the Internet as a lawless environment, the bottom line is that it is without borders, and spammers will easily be able to find an offshore haven from which to send their sexual enhancement ads. To assume that a US or UK law charging a per e-mail tax will somehow eliminate spam is unrealistic and unworkable.

The answer to that is to charge the $.01 per email back to the originating ISP if the email is received from a country that does not assess the email charge. Ultimately, though, there will have to be a fundamental alteration in the mechanics of processing SMTP mail in order to verify that the host from which mail is originating is the host it claims to be, thereby establishing a chaint of host authentication back to the originating host. This would still be able to be spoofed, but it would require more extensive work with the nameserver tree to do so.

It will also significantly reduce the incentive to use e-mail for appropriate means, such as operating an e-mail discussion list.

Which problem also isn't addressed by most of the other proposed solutions to the spam problem.

Re:Is taxation best?

[freestyle-fiend]

What is needed is a new protocol and this has already been talked about.

The only protocol that I have heard proposed is IM 2000. Is this what you were talking about, or do you know of others?

Re:Is taxation best?

[JimFromJersey]

a national spam registry, you get spam you forward it. I don't get much spam, but I assume that it is tied (somehow) to a business. DoJ then sues the company that the spam is for (after it breaks some threshold). For out of country spammers, DoC revokes their MFN trading status. That'll make spamming an organ-donating offense in China in no time.

Re:Is taxation best?

[mdinowitz]

I fail to see how I'm being subsidized by those who receive and pass the messages. Yes, they are using resources in this manner but nothing is coming to me. All my resources are going out in the form of hosting, bandwidth, etc. How will my paying thousands of dollars a day to send out email be subsidized? Will all the recipients be paying me to send them the mail? I think not. This would be the end of community email lists. As for the lists, I run the House of Fusion (www.houseoffusion.com) which is a community site who's main feature is the CF-Talk and other mailing lists. These are all archived on the site and are used by a large number of ColdFusion developers both directly and indirectly (archives, NNTP feed, direct mail, etc.) I'm quite sure that PHP, Asp, Perl and other languages have technical mailing lists of the same size or larger. Tax them and they're gone.

Re:Is taxation best?

[fferreres]

[sarcasm] Great solution. Now that I think of it, I guess you solved most problems on earth. Have a way of autenticating everyone, so they will be responsible for their actions.[/sarcasm].

Really, if you could in theory develop such scheme, why would you need to be charged on an email basis? Any offending sender would be identified and fined to death.

While I agree email is useless until we get rid of spam (and I can be done) I don't think money solves anything. It will only make the problem worst by switching the incentive to send free mails into promoting email fraud (that meaning you get a bill of $1.000 because someone, somehow found a way arround the system to impersonate you).

So no thanks.

Re:Is taxation best?

[The_K4]

IC your point now. I misunderstood before. :)

Re:Is taxation best?

[spike hay]

> we really do tax marijuana and if you pay the tax, it's legal to possess it.

Do you have any reliable references to this?


Originally this was the case with the Marijuana Tax Act. They made a token amount of stamps available. Possessing pot without the stamps was illegal. But to get a stamp, you had to obtain the pot before hand, which would make you guilty of posession. So, it was basically illegal.

Re:Is taxation best?

[banzai51]

You don't read so well, do you?

Re:Is taxation best?

[Glonoinha]

>I don't think the government would "finally cash in".

Dude the government could lose money selling drugs. There is no way this $.01 per email is going to be a cash cow, probably cost us (ie. USA tax payers) $.10 per email to collect that $.01 tax.

Re:Is taxation best?

[dustmite]

Assuming such taxes put an end to spam, the rest of (the NON-spammers) end up paying higher costs to use e-mail. Isn't that one of the main complaints about spam, that the cost burden for it is placed on non-spammers?

Re:Is taxation best?

[harriet nyborg]

?

you don't read between the lines so well, do you?

obviously, any attempt at sarcasm which isn't framed in a dilbert strip and spelled out slowly using small words is lost on this audience.

i'll try to type more slowly next time.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me that with a taxation on email, there would end up being alot more (as if there isnt enough already) overseas companies still spamming. I think it would also require them to re-think the way mail is sent and received by servers. In consideration of big ISPs, I'm sure there could be some kind of way to regulate how much email is sent, and charge accordingly.

But when you have companies who can order a T1 line, and do whatever they want with it, what is the ISP going to do. Monitor their line and make sure they don't send out any email? What if the company is using a IPSec tunnel to a foreign site which is relaying the mail? etc. etc. etc.

There are way too many variables here, and I think it would only increase the problem with email spam (or at the very least, not decrease it). I think once they got this system in place, it would only open up new holes in the mail system.

Next thing you know, we are all gonna be getting spam trying to sell us guides on "How to send email for free!!"

I can't wait.

Re:Is taxation best?

[crazysim]

I'm not a lawyer, but perhaps you can be exempt beacuse you are a "Non profit organization"

Re:Is taxation best?

[Araxen]

Taxing will only justify spam as being ok. Alot of spam companies will just chalk it up as a way of doing business nothing else.

Re:Is taxation best?

[firewood]

I run a number of mailing lists and on a good day can send out a million messages. This is all for community support with no profit at all on my side. A law like this would kill me and every other community supporter who supplies such a service.

I would gladly pay a penny a week, or a penny a day to the non-profit email lists which I value, especially if was part of a process that significantly decreased the amount of spam that needed to be filtered out of my email inbox. It's not a big amount compared to my typical monthly ISP and web hosting fees.

It would be even better if there were a way to whitelist specific non-profits of my choosing so they could email me for free.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Tacky the Penguin]

Yah! That's the ticket! Create a new tax!

This guy must be a Democrat.

On a serious note, what are all of the free email list providers going to do?


-Tacky was an odd bird, but a good bird to have around.

Re:Is taxation best?

[tria]

The government? Which government? I hate to point it out but a number of countries other than the US use the internet. Spammers would just move there business to the most 'spam friendly' country.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not do something simple? Have all email require the mail relay to do a handshake back to source to confirm send, and puts this handshake in log for all to see so we can track. Thus no more anonomous relay?

Re:Is taxation best?

[gurps_npc]

You are saying that I should spend $10 of dollars every year to buy spam blocking software instead of spending maybe 1 dollar a year to spend email - what do you think I am an idiot?

As for getting spam, you are not very knowledgable about it.

Anyone that is in buisness on the web has to give out their email a lot. In addition, people have the RIGHT to be free with their email address - your life is MUCH better if you can give it to companies that you like and actually want to hear about.

You personally may not use the web enough to get killed by spam, but not everyone has the same email needs as you. I have 3 email accounts: 1 for public use that I get about 1 real email per month, and otherwise gets filled with junk. 1 for private use that pretty much only gets emails that are caught by the free spam filter yahoo gives out, and 1 for junk-email that I give out to all untrustworthy companies. Specifically, I give that junk email out when I sign up for a web service that I want/need. That junk email is FULL up with tons of stuff, but I only check it 1/month.

As for your idea that you have to download it repeatedly, you must not know much about computers. First of all, you have to check your email - just like y ou have to check the bulletin board. If it is too inconveneient to pset up a nice favorite that you can push and take you to the newest post on the bulletin board, then Push technology is available. If you want your PC to constantly check the bulletin board and download any new page, it is available NOW.

Re:Is taxation best?

[gurps_npc]

You are correct that my solutiono does not deal with the relatively FEW people that do that kind of thing on the blackberry/cell phone.

It takes a company called AVANTGO to address that issue. Perhaps you have heard of them? They download web pages, like bulletin boards directly to your blackberry/cell phone etc.

As for rendering a page, I hate to tell you but there is no law that says a web page must have 3 million colors, 100 animated graphics, 15 fonts, 9 buttons, etc. etc. etc. If the people that make the bulletin board want to allow/encourage people like you to download to your cell phones, they can easily design their web pages to be easier to get than the email you seem to like.

Email was NOT inteneded to be used for the purpose the listservers use it for.. It is NOT a good design for this pupose and will NEVER beat a well thought out web page designed to do the same thing.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Eristone]

You are correct that my solutiono does not deal with the relatively FEW people that do that kind of thing on the blackberry/cell phone

Ummm.. you aren't a mail admin in a midsized-to-large corporate environment, are you? In my personal case, the "Few" is 280 (75% with titles of Director or above) with Blackberry units. It's about 600 or so that we send messages to their cell phones via the servers directly.

It takes a company called AVANTGO to address that issue. Perhaps you have heard of them? They download web pages, like bulletin boards directly to your blackberry/cell phone etc.

Licensing wouldn't be in the budget for this product. And I already own Blackberry Servers and have licenses paid for to handle sending e-mail out from our Exchange servers. (Corporate environs is different than the individual user who decides he wants to get his Earthlink mail...)

As for rendering a page, I hate to tell you but there is no law that says a web page must have 3 million colors, 100 animated graphics, 15 fonts, 9 buttons, etc. etc. etc. If the people that make the bulletin board want to allow/encourage people like you to download to your cell phones, they can easily design their web pages to be easier to get than the email you seem to like

Bulletin boards have existed for a long time in various forms. And there have been programs that translated those boards into offline files and individual messages so that you could respond to them - much like people respond to messages in e-mail today. (Look up an old program called OzCIS for instance...) Web pages are nice. Easy to use. And don't notify you (without a bit of work ala Slashcode) with new messages so you could whip out a reply - or follow a flame war as they come in... or give you real-time message flow vs. having to go out and get stuff yourself - which would be the true key - user having to go get an update vs. update delivered to him. And of course that's assuming that the person running the board has the understanding that it should be a low-bandwidth non-graphic intensive site... also means you have to fire up a browser...

Email was NOT inteneded to be used for the purpose the listservers use it for.. It is NOT a good design for this pupose and will NEVER beat a well thought out web page designed to do the same thing.

E-mail wasn't intended to do a lot of the things it does today. 25MB attachments. File repository. Notification alerts. We don't make the call as to how something is used - the end user does. If it didn't work fairly well, it wouldn't be as widely deployed as it is now... and website message boards haven't taken over as the new nirvana - on the contrary - the bigger boards still send you summaries.

The pronouncements you make in your last statement definitely sounds like the stuff that I hear from my senior management. They don't know what they're talking about either.

Re:Is taxation best?

[gurps_npc]

You seem very arrogant. You know so much more than senior management, yet your poor company has not seen fit to promote you to senior management. I wonder why. No I do not do the mail admin for a large company. Instead I do special projects for one. Basically, whenever they want something cool done they call us instead of their regular IT department.

Yes, my company uses blackberries too. I helped work on the software that connected them with the company wide web based contact management program. But talking about what a few companies do is NOT talking about the people on the net do. The majority of people use PC's to get their email. Period.

Yes, corporations will not be paying licenses to let you download your lists to your private blackberry. But if it is BUSINESS related, they will let you do it. At least they do at my firm. It helps to be have agreed to work for a company that did not go broke in the silicon crash.

As for why email continues to be used, that is simple. the technology is an INFANT, not mature. Give it a couple of years and those list servers could very well VANISH.

One of the major reasons they might vanish is they are pretty close to being spam. Basically, the only real difference between them and spam is the fact that they are actually desired by the useres. So pretty much ANYTHING that attacks/hurts Spam is going to have an effect on the list servers. What was it we were talking - oh yeah, ways to fight spam. And you did not like the idea being discussed because it might cause minor problems for list servers.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Eristone]

You seem very arrogant. You know so much more than senior management, yet your poor company has not seen fit to promote you to senior management. I wonder why. No I do not do the mail admin for a large company. Instead I do special projects for one. Basically, whenever they want something cool done they call us instead of their regular IT department.

On ocassion, yes, I am arrogant. Goes with the whole BOFH persona one ends up having to use when you're in IT. Regarding senior management - I haven't applied for a position. It's more fun running the systems than arguing over budgets. But where I wouldn't presume to argue with senior management over how a contract is written (unless it pertains to stuff I have to run), by the same token, I wouldn't expect them to tell me how mail works.

Yes, my company uses blackberries too. I helped work on the software that connected them with the company wide web based contact management program. But talking about what a few companies do is NOT talking about the people on the net do. The majority of people use PC's to get their email. Period.

True for the moment. But with text messaging coming of age stateside I'm willing to bet a quarter that is going to change.

Yes, corporations will not be paying licenses to let you download your lists to your private blackberry. But if it is BUSINESS related, they will let you do it. At least they do at my firm. It helps to be have agreed to work for a company that did not go broke in the silicon crash.

Actually, in my specific case, I don't care what gets sent out to the blackberries. Monthly flat fee. My employer is still hanging around, too. But that's not important.

As for why email continues to be used, that is simple. the technology is an INFANT, not mature. Give it a couple of years and those list servers could very well VANISH.

List boards are in an infant state? Umm.. no. List boards have existed for 20 years. Of course they were called BBSs back then... then matured to things like USENET, but the whole concept that you speak of has been around and kicking for a long time. And people still prefer to have messages sent to them vs. having to go out to get the messages. That's the whole thing that keeps Listserv-like stuff around.

One of the major reasons they might vanish is they are pretty close to being spam. Basically, the only real difference between them and spam is the fact that they are actually desired by the useres. So pretty much ANYTHING that attacks/hurts Spam is going to have an effect on the list servers. What was it we were talking - oh yeah, ways to fight spam. And you did not like the idea being discussed because it might cause minor problems for list servers.

I'd put this in the same category as Internet Radio. The Big Boys can afford to pay whatever tax, and the little guys end up disappearing...

Re:Is taxation best?

[Nexx]

If you want to spend the money, go ahead. For me, couple of procmail rules and a few judicious choices of trust/no trust works fine. I've been spam-free since, oh, 1997, with the same email address (singular) since then. Total cost: $0.

Now, for the meat of my rebuttal:

As for your idea that you have to download it repeatedly, you must not know much about computers. First of all, you have to check your email - just like y ou have to check the bulletin board. If it is too inconveneient to pset up a nice favorite that you can push and take you to the newest post on the bulletin board, then Push technology is available. If you want your PC to constantly check the bulletin board and download any new page, it is available NOW.

Your original claim was sending 1kb mail to 10 people was somehow less bandwith-friendly than putting a 1kb article of the same content on the web and having those same ten people come in and have a look. Right, and tell me again how that is more bandwith friendly? Ad hominem attacks aside, here are my line-by-line rebuts for the rest of your posting.

First of all, you have to check your email - just like you have to check the bulletin board.

My point was that my email is automated and checks for me. Furthermore, the bandwith is constrained to my local network, and thus free, for some value thereof. Actually, even better, using IMAP, my mail client sits quite idle until the server wakes it up, letting it know where the mail is. Furthermore, with my previous mention of procmail, I can automatically collate and sort these pieces of mail to varying mailboxes, to be looked at when I have the time.

If it is too inconvenient to pset up a nice favorite that you can push and take you to the newest post on the bulletin board, then Push technology is available.

And what if you don't set up a lovely push thing? It becomes a simulated push, with my system polling your webform. Even if your webform honours the If-Modified-Since header, that's still bandwith and time wasted. Furthermore, I have to spend $10 for the polling software (or spend time to write it myself, whichever), when stable email clients have been around forever?

Please read a post before you do anymore knee-jerk responses.

Re:Is taxation best?

[Nexx]

The majority of people use PC's to get their email.

That's why NTT DoCoMo is one of the largest, and fastest-growing ISP's in the world, right? They just happen to be a mobile phone company. PC's are the reason people are signing up in droves to use the newer mobiles with WAP and i-Mode capabilities all across the world, right?

Re:Is taxation best?

[cheungw]

Read the pdf file at "www.wakundama.com/antispamscheme.html" describing the technical details to create an E-stamp process that can be used to implement a tax process if so desired. The plus about this method is that you can impose a zero cent tax if needed.

Historical First.

[Chris_Stankowitz]

Urban legend comes to life. Wasn't this a myth passed along (via spam of course) years ago. Except I think it claimed the USPS was responsible for the tax.

Re:Historical First.

[Unoriginal Nick]

Yes.

Not with false headers

[Billly Gates]

If spammers cover their tracks then they can't be taxed. Just go after the spammed products that are advertised. This would stop spam at the source.

Re:Not with false headers

[jjo]

The point is that e-mail recipients are the real beneficiaries of the tax, and they are therefore motivated to ensure its payment. One simple approach would be to have the taxing authority issue 'e-stamps'. The receiving e-mail program would check the e-stamp for validity and non-reuse (the stamp would be keyed to the particular sender, recipient, and timestamp of the message).

If the e-stamp was invalid, the recipient's program could either just throw the message away, or forward it to the tax authorities for enforcement action. Either way, the tax achieves its purpose.

Re:Not with false headers

[terraformer]

The problem is that the little "feature" of SMTP named forged headers is incredibly useful for people. What needs to happen is a header that can identify the server and user that sent it. But not the From: feild. This would require some combination of digital signatures and SMTP auth.

Re:Not with false headers

[Chris_Stankowitz]

If spammers cover their tracks then they can't be taxed. Just go after the spammed products that are advertised. This would stop spam at the source.

That wouldn't work. I know many don't view large drug companies as being very ethical. However, I doubt a company the likes of Pfizer needs to use spam to sell Viagra. They probabbly didn't need to spend 1$ to sell it for that matter. Yet, I we all know that we get a few of these messages a day. Sure many are for a bunch of unknown products that may or may not be directly tied to the spamer, but you would still have to go after the spamer or the person employing them and the products THEY sold.

Re:Not with false headers

[Jens]

"One simple approach would be to have the taxing authority issue 'e-stamps'. The receiving e-mail program would check the e-stamp for validity and non-reuse ..."

We already have this. It's called a PGP signature.

The cost is a couple CPU cycles. Per email. Non-reusable, quick, easy and efficient. If everybody would start using PGP (which IMHO is a hell of a lot more likely than everybody switching to an "email-tax compatible" state-mandated commercial email client), we wouldn't have a spam problem any more.

Spammers just can't afford to sign their mails - with any signature. It's too expensive in CPU cycles. And note that the point here is NOT to validate the sender, it's just to validate that the sender had to burn a couple CPU cycles (which takes maybe a second on a 500MHz computer, for each email) to send it.

Re:Not with false headers

[mark_lybarger]

so not only do we need to modify all existing email server programs to accomidate for this SMTP modification for to give money to the US government, but all email clients will also need to be modified?

spam is not a "social" issue that needs resolved by governemental intervention. it is a technological issue where people have found a way to exploit a widely used technology for their benefit. it's the technology that has the problem and needs to be fixed. governments and taxes and laws have no business in this problem space.

Re:Not with false headers

[s0m3body]

once something like this is working, you don't need that tax anymore if everybody would be using e-signature and mail clients would ignore emails without it, spammer would need e-signature as well for taxing purposes, this signature would have to be connected to a real person somehow - this means that also spammer would need e-signature connected to him then it would be much easier to stop that spammer tracking down how he obtained e-signature the tax itself is irrelevant - it is the question of linking an email to a person which is important

Re:Not with false headers

[GuyWithLag]

I'm quoting you:

it's the technology that has the problem and needs to be fixed.

I'm paraphrasing(sp?) you:

so not only do we need to modify all existing email server programs to accomidate for this SMTP modification [to fix this techical issue], but all email clients will also need to be modified?

Note that i'm totally against this taxing idea and consider it ridiculous at best. This stuff is proposed only by people that confuse e-mail with snail mail; they also don't know the technicalities involved in such a change.

Re:Not with false headers

[mark_lybarger]

yeah, i kinda contradicct my self, but the point was that in order to simply implement a taxation, we would need to modify all client/server software to make it viable. the problem being solved by taxation was to eliminate spam. that could be eliminated by fixing the problem in smtp (yes that might require client/server software upgrades too, but could more easily be backward compatible.

Re:Not with false headers

[Xformer]

Otherwise known as... the end of mailing lists as we all know them.

Re:Not with false headers

[Anonymous Coward]

As it happens, right now I'm writing a client-side app that communicates with my database over webservices. The app needs to send email. But I don't want to have to configure the thing to point at various clients' company email servers, plus we run into security restrictions if the app tries to communicate with any server except our own. So, I'm passing the email fields to my server, along with username/password (using ssl), looking up the user's email address, and sending out an email with the user's email in the From.

It seems to me you can't disallow forged headers without making this a lot more complicated.

Besides, anonymous email is important sometimes, and there are other ways to deal with spam besides changing the entire infrastructure. For example: 1) Use a Bayesian filter, and 2) When the filter rejects an email, send a challenge - 'reply to this email to get your message through'...if the header was forged, this will never reach the sender, but it gives you a backup to help the false-positives problem.

ISPs still have the traffic for a while, but put a feature like this in the popular clients and spam profitability will drop through the floor.

Re:Not with false headers

[FyRE666]

I'm not sure if I follow you with this. Are you suggesting the MTAs reject if the signature is invalid, or the recipient runs a client to drop bad sigs?

If the former, then this would add a huge CPU load to the MTAs processing millions of messages per day, wouldn't it? If the latter, then it's hardly going to help the bandwidth wastage we're already suffering...

Re:Not with false headers

[gpinzone]

So if I wanted to get my competators in hot water, all I'd have to do is spam people with a link to their product. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Re:Not with false headers

[SN74S181]

That, specificially, is why this idea has no chance whatsoever of going anywhere.

People who subscribe to email lists are some of the most organized people on the net. Try to take away their listservs and you'll see sheer hell break out.

Re:Not with false headers

[dspeyer]

Put it on both sides and you've got it.

Make everyone's PGP (or GPG, whatever) key available by some variant of the finger protocol. Now make all e-mail encrypted.

Now you'll need some CPU time for every e-mail sent, and you'll need to use your own bandwidth (can't have open relays replicate your single message to a million recipients if they each need a seperate signature).

It should also make it a lot easier to block spammers by sender, though I suppose they can change keys every five minutes.

Re:Not with false headers

[Anonymous Coward]

If spammers cover their tracks then they can't be taxed. Just go after the spammed products that are advertised. This would stop spam at the source.

This is exactly what I do. I find out who the company that the spam is selling for and get their email, fax, physical address and names of owners. With that information I then sign them up for as much spam and junk mail as is viable, send them a fax (via email to fax relay, giving their email address for receipt) thanking them for their kind offer, and that in return I have kindly arranged for them to receive many such lucrative offers from other spammers.

Re:Not with false headers

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no.

All you need is a header that records the transit of the message, and any return reciept. All placed there mail servers as the message flows through. More, or less...

MsgRoute: System X at time; system Y at time.

Now spam can be traced back to a point of nearest responsibility. Maybe not the spammer, but if a point in the routing is proliferating spam by dumping/forging prior headers, then they will be identified and dealt with appropriately.

Nothing much else really need change. No keys, signitures, taxes, draconian laws, etc. Just a fair and even exchange on the information flow. Yea, It would be nice if e-mail hosts could support host side end-user header filters, then we wouldn't have to download the noise just to auto-trash it.

Better than "ADV", now I can just use something like privoxy with a black list of routing points I don't like.

Anyway, taxation is the most stupid thing I've heard. If the infrastructure were to the point e-mails could be taxed, the problem wouldn't exist. How can an open relay tax a sender it has no direct knowledge of?

Lay stupidity, Government, and Computers. A combination that never ceases to amaze those of us with clues.

Re:Not with false headers

[zcat_NZ]

So if I wanted to get my competators in hot water, all I'd have to do is spam people with a link to their product. Sounds like a good idea to me.

The same arguement theoretically applies to junk faxes and telemarketing calls, but I've yet to hear of any company 'junk faxing' adverts for a competitor's product or service in order to get the competitor in trouble.

Re:Not with false headers

[gpinzone]

They'd only get in trouble if someone complained. In this case, we're talking tax fraud which involves the government and their friendly IRS attack dogs. With a fax scam, an investigation would turn up the originator's phone number. Try that with e-mail spam being bounced off some open server in China.

I'd go for it

[nother_nix_hacker]

I think this is a good idea. I would gladly pay tax on email to stop me spending all of my money on penis enlargements!

Re:I'd go for it

[swordboy]

I think this is a good idea.

Me too... The tax would accelerate the development of a mail transfer protocol that does not lend itself to spamming. There are many solutions out there... none of them will ever be used because everyone is so lazy.

Why don't they just ban SMTP? It would probably be cheaper.

Re:I'd go for it

[ReelOddeeo]

Taxing e-mail is the wrong way to go.

Instead tax unsolicited commercial e-mail. Write a clear definition in the law of exactly what UCE is. Be sure to include any commercial e-mail sent to addresses on a list that was purchased, rented or leased.

Why bother everyone else with the administrative overhead of keeping track of how many e-mails they send? Just bother the spammers.

Require all spam to include a special message header with their spam-license in it. E-mail software or end users could check a government web site to make sure the license key is valid and that the spammer had paid their tax.

(nevermind the fact that such a special message header becomes a possible filtering criteria.)

Re:I'd go for it

[-brazil-]

It's a very bad idea. it would immediately destroy all noncommercial mailing lists, and people would very quickly find a way to disguise their email traffic as e.g. HTTP traffic.

Re:I'd go for it

[letxa2000]

Why not spend the money on a working spam filter? Bayesian is entirely great.

I am skeptical of any solution that requires a change in protocols--if the new protocol is open and free I'd be happy, but I'm afraid a new protocol could be just another effort for a few companies to take control of the Internet and decide who can and can't send email.

I'm also opposed to anything that charges for email. There are many users that send many, many emails per year. My website has an opt-in mailing list that sends emails to about 4000 people per evening. That's 1460000 per year. If we're charging 1-cent per email that's $14600.00 per year--and guess what, that's more than my website earns in a year. Bye bye mailing list.

Two things:

1. If there's going to be money involved, it has to be a system where the receiver can "return" money to authorized senders and only keep the money from unauthorized spammmers. And the money collected goes to the RECEIVER, not a tax that is kept by the government (which can be later raised, and raised, and you get the idea).

2. Solutions that require laws or massive changes in protocols must be very carefully watched. While it's not impossible there is a solution of that sort that could actually help, it's possible it could be a power-grab where certain companies would be allowed to decide who can and can't send email. Kind of like having a Constitutual convention in the U.S.: The last time it happened they threw out the whole thing and started over which is why sometimes people are afraid to have another Constitutal Convention. Same here, establishing a new protocol could either be extremely great and helpful or could serve the interests of a few and the rest of the world pays a price worse than the spam we're trying to get rid of.

I think the solution is technical. Widespread deployment of effective filters, especially Bayesian, at the ISP level will reduce the amount of spam that makes it to the users lowering even more than response rate. So we reduce how much spam we SEE via technical means and reduce how much spam is sent by taking spammers to court by charging them with theft of service or DoS attacks.

Re:I'd go for it

[Anonymous Coward]

bahh i say:
the cheapest way is to plug out the cable!!!
shut down the internet

Re:I'd go for it

[Reziac]

All that happens in that case, is that spammers move their operations overseas -- easy enough to find an open relay in China, so why bother paying for bandwidth here?? And if header tracking is used to assign tax, perhaps they forge ReelOddeeo@wherever.net in the FROM field ;)

Re:I'd go for it

[xpurple]

I would not. I will not stand for that. There is no valid reason for the government to 'tax' our email. Taxation of that sort is stealing. No good will come of it.

Spam like it or not is freedom of speech, and is protected by the first amendment. If you truly believe in freedom of speech you must be willing to let people say things that you do not agree with, even things that disturb you.

What we should be doing is going after these people who send mail out via other people's servers, or violate their ISP's terms and conditions to send out spam. Spam itself is not the problem. It's how it's done.

If everyone ran a tight ship spam would be far less of a problem. Who all here has insured that every linux box they own isn't an open relay? If not your part of the problem.

Get off your but and do something about the problem, don't sit back and let the government run your life for you. That's not what they are there for.

Re:I'd go for it

[Anonymous Coward]

"Spam like it or not is freedom of speech, and is protected by the first amendment. If you truly believe in freedom of speech you must be willing to let people say things that you do not agree with, even things that disturb you."

Wrong. Advertisements are NOT speach, that is why we have truth in advertising laws. They are Advertisments something entirely different.

Re:I'd go for it

[theCoder]

Why don't they just ban SMTP? It would probably be cheaper.

You're free to stop using it whenever you want. No one's stopping you. If there's another mail protocol that you prefer, go ahead and use it. Get your friends to start using it. If it's really better, it will catch on. There's no need for a ban on anything.

Bans would just lead to unnecessary questions anyway -- who would deremine what's banned? Who would enforce it? Would the RIAA get to ban P2P protocols? Would the NSA get to ban SSH and other encryption (at least for non-Americans)? Too many questions, too few answers.

btw, I would like to see this fictitious spam free mail protocol. Considering that advertisers have found ways of getting advertising in just about every form of communication, you're facing a pretty strong foe already. Coupled with that, in this new protocol, I want to ability to receive unsolicited email from people I don't already know (I don't know everyone on the world -- do you?) I also want to be able to send and receive mailing list mail. The second requirement all but eliminates sender pay (either money or CPU time) mail. The first requirement eliminates things like whitelists (like AOL's stupid policy that should get their connection terminated, but that's a different post...) The ability to receive unsolicted mail makes it all but impossible to prevent unsolicited commercial email. Oh, and if you think that this requirement isn't useful, consider sending an email to a tech support address (like tech@example.com) asking a question. Do you think that address is going to be the one that responds? More often than not, your question gets routed to an individual, who will respond with their own address. If you block "unsolicited" (because you didn't really solicit from that address) email, then you won't get your response.

Oh, and one more thing -- any new protocol must be free and Free. It must be free to use (or no one will use it) and it must be Free to implement (or again, no one will use it).

SMTP wil be around until something better comes along. It takes both a reason to change and something good to change to. SSH was able to replace telnet in many places because it did everything telnet did, and much more (like transparent X forwarding), in addition to being secure. Your replacement for SMTP must do the same (everything that SMTP does, and prevent spam), or it will fail. Good Luck!

Re:I'd go for it

[ReelOddeeo]

The tax would accelerate the development of a mail transfer protocol that does not lend itself to spamming.

The tax would accelerate the development of a mail transfer protocol that does not lend itself to taxing.

Re:I'd go for it

[ReelOddeeo]

Spammers may move overseas, but if they collect money in the US, then it can be taxed here, and even siezed here.

I'm not proposing header tracking to enforce the tax. Only that legally taxed spammers must include a header with a key that prooves they've paid the tax. This has the dual purpose of making it easy to filter spam from those who have paid, and of making it more clear who to vigorously prosecute for tax evasion and asset seizure. Not only this, but also prision time. The spammers have to collect money somehow.

Back to the header. The header might have to be some private key function of an MD5 of the spam so that anyone can verify that this is not just a copied header from some "legitimate" spammer. In fact, spam tax evasion filters could be set up at major routing points. See an e-mail with a forged spam tax stamp? Serious prosecution. The major routing points may have a much better idea where this is comming from. Furthermore, you can stop it at the borders all automatically. This means that illegal spam will make sure to NOT put the header in place, in order make it more difficult to track down the origin.

If the amount of spam dwindles to almost zero, it may be easier to track down the tax-evading spam. Just follow the money.

Re:I'd go for it

[Reziac]

I think we'd do better to make it difficult for the people who hire spammers -- I'd bet many who do business in the U.S. could be nailed for fraud and/or tax evasion. Other countries have similar laws re mail fraud and tax evasion -- get 'em all on the bandwagon and make sale-via-spam a risky business wherever these laws reach. It would do more good for the public (fewer people getting scammed) and make spamming far less profitable.

And that couldn't expand itself into becoming a tax on ALL email, which I think is a real risk if spam is taxed, tax being the kudzu it is.

straight jacked

[Dogun]

Seriously, I know this kid, we call him "Oafy the Spam Bot" - he responds to literally 4/5 emails he's ever gotten. Not only that, he initiates about as much as he responds.

For someone like him, this would royally suck. And as much as it sucks to be spammed by my good friend Oafy, Oafy is still a friend, and his spam isn't advertisements for hot sexy teens to suck and fuck my cock.

Effective, yes.
Good, no.

Plus, what are they going to do next? Tax pings? Times you initiate connections over port 6667?

My $0.02 US

Re:straight jacked

[jmccay]

That's the tip of the iceberg. Once a tax is implemented, it NEVER goes away--or maybe I should say RARELY goes away. Taxes only go up! Just ask someone from a state that has a liberal spending habit which is now seeing budgets in the red by a LARGE amount. I garentee that someone in that state is talking about raising taxes. How do we know it'll stay at 1 cent/letter? If it's managed, or done at, the State level, what happens when the email crosses borders? I think the money won't get to the internet backbone if it's done at the state level because State's are always robbing Peter to pay Paul (reallocating money from one source to cover something else entirely different).
Look at the postage rate. It's gone up a lot recently--mainly to pay for the raises of the top positions in the US Postal service. (Yes, I know it's lower than other places in the world, but that doesn't matter. The rate is compared to what it used to be here, and why the increase was made.)
I will give a more concrete example from my home state of New Hampshire. Although this is not strictly about taxes, it brings up another issue about taxes. For years, New Hampshire used to advertise that the money from scratch tickets went to paying for education in the state, but it wasn't exactly true. The money went into the pot with all other income, and the amount for education was dependant upon how much the legislator decided to spend on education. How do we know the money will be spent on the the internals of the internet? How will the money get distributed, and who will get the money?
There is also the Microsft factor. What happens when another virus attacks and starts sending massive emails? There hasn't been a real virus in a while, but it will happen again. The cost could get enormous depending on the virus, and the responce time of the company whose product was targeted (like Microsoft for Outlook). Will the company be held responceably?
What about annonymous remailer options, and other methods used to send anonymous email? How will those get tracked and charged?
What if other things are taxed ont he internet? How will the those of us looking for a job be effected? A vast majority of the employed posts are on the internet, and they want resumes sent via email. Taxes on the internet, that will only go up, will make it harder for modern job seekers.
I think spammers will find new ways to send their emails so that they won't get charged, and there will probbably be loop holes that make the law useless.
I think these questions, and others not mentioned here REALLY need to be answered BEFORE we think about adding a tax to the internet. I don't think anything good will come from adding a tax to the internet.

Re:straight jacked

[Dogun]

Oafy the Spambot (who actually sends very relevant emails) would thank you.
On another note, I agree with every one of your points. The tax is a shit shit shitty idea.

it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[Unominous Coward]

By having any completely free resource, you open the system up to abuse.

Sure, people hate paying for what they used to get for free, but if the price is reasonable then there's no reason not to accept it.

Note that I said reasonable price. In many cases where charges are introduced, the people running the system usually manage to turn this into a money-making exercise before too long.

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[quizwedge]

Income tax was originally outlawed in the U.S. It was deemed necessary at some point, but only the extremely wealthy had to pay so it was accepted. Now look where we are. Yes, it may start out at one cent per e-mail (or even a fraction of a cent per e-mail), but what happens if that's "not effective enough" or "costs of bandwidth go up"?

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[plague3106]

Why should 99% of the people have to pay because 1% are fucking it up for everyone else?

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[jackb_guppy]

All an email tax gets you... IS SPAM.

Look at the direct mailers filling the land fills with credit card offers and other equally unneed things.

Their business model INCLUDES the mailing cost cost (less than what you can pay) and the print costs. The USPS helps them to get in business.

Last I heard 80% of all mailings was junk mail.

Now a tax to send email... The ISP gets a cut, so they can increase network bandwidth. We pay as users to increase network bandwidth. They SPAMERS would pay too, it is included in their costs.

So what do you get... The same model as the USPS.

Now that shows why a price per email is not going to stop anything.

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

Because it is the easy solution that reaps the largest power grab.

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[mark_lybarger]

yeah, we're in a whole world of crap where the government takes more 15/25/30% right off the top. that's more money than god gets. why does this country need more of my money than god?

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

why does this country need more of my money than god?

Probably has to do with the fact that they can't make things materialize into existance...

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[The AtomicPunk]

Income tax was originally outlawed in the U.S. It was deemed necessary at some point, but only the extremely wealthy had to pay so it was accepted. Now look where we are.

That's okay, the democrats say only the rich pay income taxes or benefit from tax cuts, so you're OBVIOUSLY rich... =)

I assume you've written your representative and asked them to support HR25, the Fair Tax Bill of 2003?

And that you vote Libertarian? :)

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[quizwedge]

Rich? Well, maybe for someone just out of college, but not rich by a long shot.

Haven't written my representative, though representatives from Connecticut don't seem to care what conservatives say anyway. Still, I should check the bill out and see what it says.

I'm not quite Libertarian. More conservative Republican. Libertarians (from my understanding) only want the government to be in charge of taxes and war. I think there's a benefit to interstates and having one currency (though I guess that could come under taxes) as well as interstate commerce. Maybe I'm missinformed though.

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[Smidge204]

I thought donations to the Church were tax deductable... :)

And you want to know why the government needs that money? You have paved roads to drive on? Free public education? Public libraries? The government pays for a lot of stuff, you know. (Granted, not as efficiently as it could be, but still)

=Smidge=

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[mark_lybarger]

yes, it's tax deductable. to what extent i don't know. can i give 100% of my money to god and then not pay taxes?

these things (roads, schools, libraries) were around long before the massive raping all the governmental bodies are doing to the citizens. most of all taxes should be at the local level to pay those things. the federal government is spending HUGE amounts of money where it does not belong (farming subsidies just to name one).

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[j-pimp]

Yeah, but they have no business running healthcare. Why is it that doctors make less and less money these days yet healthcare costss so much. Bureacrats, thats why. And how do we get rid of bureacrats? Deregulation is the answer.

Look what it did for the airlines. At first everyone complained because if you got on a plane you had to sit next to people that previously could only afford to go greyhound. Nowadays, all those people take southwest airlines. And the other airlines still offer more bang for your buck in terms of service. Also if you don't mind being packed in, and have a few drinks if its a long flight southwest isn't that bad at all.

Yes we do need some taxes, and the government is best at doing certain things liek paving roads. However, we should severly limit what they do. Government is a neccessary evil.

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[The AtomicPunk]

I'm not quite Libertarian. More conservative Republican. Libertarians (from my understanding) only want the government to be in charge of taxes and war. I think there's a benefit to interstates and having one currency (though I guess that could come under taxes) as well as interstate commerce.

Yes, and the republicans want to control absolutely every aspect of your life including half your money - so you're willing to sacrifice that for toll-free interstate highways? :)

I seriously doubt the interstate highway system is going toll - it's not exactly a priority in the grand scheme of things. ;)

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[quizwedge]

Yes, and the republicans want to control absolutely every aspect of your life including half your money - so you're willing to sacrifice that for toll-free interstate highways? :)

I find that Bush and company seem to be more about cutting taxes than the Democrats. Not as much as the Libertarians, but the Libertarians can afford to cut that much if they're only funding a military. I don't think the highway system is going toll, but if the federal government didn't keep it up, then it might.

If you have a good place with informative views and arguments for Libertarians, I'd be interested in seeing it. Living in such a liberal state, I don't hear much above the roar of the Democrats. :)

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[gfxguy]

And you want to know why the government needs that money? You have paved roads to drive on? Free public education? Public libraries? The government pays for a lot of stuff, you know. (Granted, not as efficiently as it could be, but still)

Paved transportation infrastructure should be paid for in gasoline and other transportation related taxes - that way the people that use it the most (wether it's directly from driving, or indirectly by receiving a lot of mail and packages) pay the cost. People that use the roads should pay more.

Free public education mainly comes from property taxes, with some federal incentives thrown in. Again, sales tax and property tax should pay for public education as the people in the community are the direct recipients of the output of the schools (well, we can discuss the sad state of public education in the U.S. in another thread). In fact, this is what would push vouchers over the top - better education with less cost. Three decades of declining education proves that the more money you throw at it, the worse it gets - we need competition.

Public libraries? Same thing. In fact, libraries would be better off if they weren't free. First, they'd support themselves, and second - as should be the case, they'd go "out of business" if the community wasn't interested enough to support them. No, they shouldn't exactly be free market enterprises - they can have every opportunity that commercial businesses don't have, like paying no taxes.

There are other things that simply deserve to die - like the National Endowment for the Arts. It's not that I have anything against the Arts, I took art classes, I appreciate fine arts, I love music - but people should not be FORCED to donate their money to the arts if they don't want to.

I'm not saying my solution is perfect, but my reasoning is that infrastructure that is maintained by the government should be payed for by taxing those people that use that infrastructure. Why should someone who walks to work or school everyday be taxed the same amount to maintain roads as someone who drives 30 miles?

My take? Police, fire, military: property taxes. Those with the most valuable assets pay more to protect them. All my ides still scale relative to economic classes - poor people still pay less, wealthy people pay more. Income tax is not a necessity - the U.S. lasted over 150 years without it, and still had (some) roads, military, police, fire protection, and schools. Everything else is pork.

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[Smidge204]

I'll reply to this one, since it seems the most intelligent :) (Note that I'm not disagreeing in any real sense)

Paved transportation infrastructure should be paid for in gasoline and other transportation related taxes

It is. Much in the same way that bridge tolls go mainly towards their mainteinance (or at least it's supposed to). Last I heard, the Clinton administration raised the Gasoline tax here to an all-time high of 18.4 cents per gallon. (I am not sure if the current administration raised it since, but you can pretty much guess that it hasn't gone down!)

Now, whether or not that tax goes to maintaining roads and other traffic infastructures is a good point. It should, but probably doesn't.

Three decades of declining education proves that the more money you throw at it, the worse it gets

I wouldn't be so quick to make such a direct correlation, but the overall sentament is true. Personally, I feel the decline of the education system is due to the population growing faster than the supply of qualified teachers. Money is certaintly one thing that would be required to fix this, but not the only thing.

I could rant about stupid teachers for pages, but to sum it up in a single analogy: I work as an engineering consultant (designing plumbing and HVAC for the architects)... a very large portion of our work has been school expansions and renovations, which inevitably requiers visiting the schools to record existing conditions.

When declaring that we're from the engineer's office (when checking in at the administration desk, or when someone asks what we're doing), it's not uncommon to hear someone make comment about what trains have to do with the work that was going on. (Try not to think about that too hard, it hurts after awhile)

Basically, I feel the problem with the education system is more related to lack of qualified teachers than it is with misappropriation/lack/excess of funds. Bad teachers make for poorly educated students, and poorly educated students grow up to (sometimes) be bad teachers.

Public libraries? Same thing. In fact, libraries would be better off if they weren't free.

See, that's soemthing I don't necessarily agree with. The whole point is that information is supposed to be available to anyone, not just those who can afford it (Note that I didn't use the word "free", clearly not all information can really be free, nor should be). Although the internet has the potential to draw a lot of interest away from physical libraries, it's never going to replace them.

Plus, if a library "goes out of business" jsut because there's not enough interest, what about future generations? It's not like a video store or pizza shop, which are a dime a dozen (around here at least) and can come and go overnight. A library is a big invenstment, and once it's gone it's very likely to stay gone.

There are other things that simply deserve to die - like the National Endowment for the Arts.

Again, I'm not sure I'd agree with such a generalization. I think we agree that the arts are an important part of society, and that it's worth preserving. Although I admit I'm not comfortable with the wholesale subsidizing of our culture just because it won't stay afloat on it's own, I do support tax money going towards it.

I don't think many people would complain about their taxes if they really got the feeling that they were getting something for their money. (Clearly, tax money is not being handled wisely, and that's a big problem.)

To borrow a phrase from you: the more money you throw at it (more taxes), the worse it gets (poor handling of tax revenue). New taxes solve nothing in the long run.
=Smidge=

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[autopr0n]

decades of declining education proves that the more money you throw at it, the worse it gets

Oh, that explains why inner-city schools with recive way less money then rich suburban shools do so much better!

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[default luser]

"yes, it's tax deductable. to what extent i don't know. can i give 100% of my money to god and then not pay taxes?"

Nope. Uncle Sam says "Show me tha money"

Limit for deductible charitable donations ( without looking too deeply into your recipients ): %20 of adjusted gross income.

For an accredited charity, the deduction is limited to 50% of adjusted gross income. Any higher and the deduction carries over, so you get hit for the other %50.

Basically, if you're already paying taxes ( you're not the poverty-line, EIC type ), then there's no way to avoid paying taxes through charitable deductions.

* Just want to make one note about something you passed over. Farming subsidies are one of the hardest concepts to understand in this country. I'm not going to say that they're good or bad, the key to them is they bring consistency. You know for a fact that you can walk into a supermarket and buy food for a reasonable price. It will be there every day, and the prices remain mostly flat, especially for staples like meat, milk, breads and vegetables. This is the kind of situation you need when you're trying to provide essential goods to 300 million people every day.

Can the free market do better? Hard to say, but the fact of the matter is I don't want to wake up one morning and find out the the North American food market has turned into some DRAM-like dumping ground. You know the story, the market gets oversupplied, and all but a select few get killed off in massive price-dumping wars.

International commodity markets can produce this sort of effect, where people ramp up as soon as prices start rising, and dump instead of holding stock when prices tank. Prices can fluctuate ludicrous amounts in a month. Add agriculture's suceptibility to the environment, and do you have to wonder anymore why these subsidies exist?

No thanks, I'll sit down and enjoy my price-controled food while I try to think of a better way.

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[gfxguy]

Oh, that explains why inner-city schools with recive way less money then rich suburban shools do so much better!

Really? Here in Atlanta the "city" kids get upwards of 50% more spent on them then the rural kids, and with demonstrably worse performance.

The schools that rank the highest are no where near the top spenders here in Georgia.

Keep in mind that you might want to claim that things are more expensive in the city - but the public schools don't pay taxes, and are supplied by the same vendors as the rural schools.

Moreover, private schools spend LESS per student - and they have to include costs like property taxes that public schools don't include in their cost per student analysis.

Any way you slice it up, throwing more money at the problem is not going to make it go away. I'm not saying it's definately not part of the solution, I'm saying that the government has, for years, simply thrown more money into the system and that hasn't worked - they haven't implemented the recommendations of the study done 20 twenty years ago - "A Nation at Risk", a report done in 1983 about the state of education in the U.S.

To be brief: no performance pay for teachers, no teacher assesment, no longer school days (and actually a SHORTER school year, contrary to the recommendation). That's just to start.

Why do you think this is? My bet is unions - helps the teachers, hurts the kids.

Of course there's a lot more blame to go around - parents, for example, and the lack of discipline. Unfortunately, teachers get chastised for sending too many kids to the principles office, even if the result is an atmosphere where learning can actually take place.

But back on subject, before income tax schools were payed for through property taxes. You might infer, then, that rich suburbs would have more money. That may be the case, but the discrepency is not as large as you might think - property values in the cities are much higher than the suburbs, and property taxes are also generally much higher. Moreover, the state can tax property and spread the money where it's needed.

The problem we have is that the federal government taxes income, then uses that money to extort the states - "do what we want you to do or you don't get the additional funding."

We are all the beneficiaries of good education, and I have no problem paying for it through my tax dollars if it's spent wisely. I shudder to think that my tax dollars are going into unions that prop up low performing teachers and drag down high performing ones.

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[gfxguy]

Well, I wasn't trying to imply that gasoline wasn't taxed - it certainly is. The question is where does that money go to?

Here's an example: Georgia (my current home state) has a budget shortfall. The governer (whom I helped elect) doubled the budget for parties at the governer's mansion. He raised cigarette taxes to partially cover the budget shortfall.

First, I don't smoke, but I don't have to to see how crazy the logic is. The big whine from the politicians with the dollar signs in their eyes was that the government has to cover healt costs for all these sickly, wheezy, cancer ridden smokers. So they justify all those cigarette taxes, and then go and spend it on something besides healthcare.

Now, Clinton may have raised federal taxes on gasoline, but there are state and local taxes on gasoline, too. Why are people in San Fransisco paying $2.00/gallon when people in Atlanta are paying $1.30? Believe me - Atlanta has a LOT of commuters, you cannot claim that San Fransisco needs to support more - because if they do, they should be making up that revenue in volume...

Which brings us back to schools. Surely new neighborhoods are being built, and new schools are needed. Who pays for them? It should be the new neighborhood. That's how it used to work (well, way back when the community would get together and build the single room schools, but we don't need to go back that far). In other words, there was X number of schools supported by a population of Y. Class sizes were small and manageable. So how come X/Y has gotten smaller and education gotten worse? In other words, if we need more schools it's because the population has increased - but that simply means more people paying property taxes which should be proportional to how it was before.

This is one of my big questions every time someone suggests a new tax - we were paying for it before without this tax, why all of a sudden do you need more? Why do we need proportionally MORE for everything? And when will the trend stop? A penny here, a penny there, and suddenly there's nothing left for the taxpayer - taxes can't keep rising indefinately, there's a breaking point.

Taxes rise because the government (as you point out), mishandles the money, where private organizations would go out of business doing the same.

W.R.T. public libraries, I don't think paying to borrow a book (which, I suppose, is actually renting) is a great idea, I'll admit, but the idea of having a library at all is something that the community should agree upon and be WILLING to pay for. If they are not WILLING to pay the cost, the money shouldn't be forcibly taken from them by the government ("we'll throw you in jail or take away your property if you don't pay").

Same thing with the National Endowment for the Arts. Like we both said - we both support the arts, I think it's an extremely important thing - but I don't support ALL the arts, or ALL artists - if the government is going to forcibly make me donate money to the arts, shouldn't I at least be able to decide where the money goes?

Which leads me to my conclusion - the transportion infrastructure example is the clearest, easiest example to give. If gasoline taxes are used only for transportation and transportation related expenses, then I know that when I'm paying that tax I'm doing good for the community at large, as well as myself, and I know that everyone who takes advantage of the system is paying a fair share. That's what makes it reasonable. I don't know where the hell my income taxes are going to, and the government doesn't seem to feel inclined to clearly spell it out, either. Better for them, because if more people knew then more people would be outraged.

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[Smidge204]

Since we seem to agree on everything else, I'll just cover this little tidbit:

Surely new neighborhoods are being built, and new schools are needed. Who pays for them? It should be the new neighborhood.

It is! Typically, there are several schools owned by a central district (Around here, par is about twelve elementary schools, two junior high schools and a high school... this vary of course). When a district decides to build a new school, or expand/renovate an existing one (more common because it's getting hard to find large hunks of suitable land around here), they typically float a bond to raise the cash. The bond is paid for by the people living in that district.

Depending on the nature of the work (good example: Energy-reducing upgrades, like more efficient lighting and heating equipment) the district may receive up to 15% of the estimated budget from the state... but I've only seem that happen twice and it's typically just lighting upgrades. *shrugs*

But anyway, we do agree that taxes themselves are not the problem - just how and where they're being spent. :)
=Smidge=

Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it

[gfxguy]

You are right, of course, but I was trying to say that the federal government should keep their hands off, period - right now the government has a lot of power throwing money to the states for education (among other things). Is the bulk payed for locally? Sure. But there are millions of federal dollars being waved at state representatives, and that makes them often kowtow to the will of the federal government, even though the federal government doesn't have the right or jurisdiction.

I'd rather pay more in local and state property taxes to take up the slack then have that money taken from my paycheck by the feds, only to be used to have more control over the states. When you include the mismanagement every time money changes hands, there's a lot of financial attenuation (financial attenuation?) that happens before the money comes back around to your neighborhood.

With the exception of things like the military, that's what eats up federal income taxes - it may come back around to help you locally, but by that time the money is only a fraction of what they took out of your paycheck. I'm just an advocate for stronger state and local governments, and weaker federal government. It encourages competition, and competition among states would be as beneficial to the "people" as competition among businesses - it would apply to taxation rates, education, just about everything.

mailing lists

[IrregularApocalypse]

thats a really good idea :-/ what about mailing lists? i'm on several, and its not uncommon for me to get several hundred emails per day... why are there so many fools in the world... [sigh]

a really bad idea

[danny]

Quite apart from the enforcement problems (international jurisdiction, for one thing), this would kill a lot of mailing lists completely. I run some small lists for distributing my book reviews, for example, sending out maybe 2000 messages a month, and even US$20/month would deter me from doing that. And the big discussion lists I'm on would cost a fortune to run at 1c/message.

Ok, so maybe people signing up to a list would have to pay for the messages they receive... but now we're basically talking micropayments!

Danny.

Re:a really bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

The enforcement problems will result in me not using servers in the US any longer, and it will result in companies in the US setting up servers outside the country; advertising that sending e-mails to them won't cost a cent (unless you happen to be inside the US yourself)...

the result will hurt the US economy both directly and indirectly, as people in the US won't use electronic communications as much any longer...

Re:a really bad idea

[dheltzel]

I agree. this is a bad idea. I run and use mail lists also, and I know I'd stop mine. Most mails lists would cease to operate, except those that are "sponsored" by advertising. So how will this help?
I predict mail list users would go back to USEnet (we all know how Spam-free that is) or resort to web-based forums (arguably a better idea anyway, but I don't want it forced this way).

If the government would stop writing new law (and imposing new taxes) and just enforce what we have (and collect what is already owed), there would be fewer problems. It's easier to create laws than to enforce them, and the devil's always in the implementation details, whether it's a law or a technology.

Re:a really bad idea

[c_g_hills]

This could be a good thing if you think about it. I find trying to follow a discussion a high-volume mailing list extremely difficult. Why not set up an nntp server instead? Threads are a lot easier to follow. And it is less likely to be used for spamming.

Re:a really bad idea

[Minna Kirai]

Micropayments would actually be a good part of an excellent solution to spam.

The FT author is correct that a tiny per-message cost would wipe out the spamming business, while being unnoticable to normal users. But the best way to implement a system like that is not through a tax by the government- but by a voluntary charge set by each recipient. (The sender is apprised of the fee when transmitting, and has the option to either pay up, or abort the message)

If everyone charged $0.01 to (or as much as $0.25) to get an email, then spammers would go out of business, but friends engaging in back & forth correspondence will balance out with each other. And, mailing-lists should be able to instruct subscribers on how to white-list ML correspondence, so that it's permitted with no fee.

This scheme is permissive, and some amount of unsolicited commercial mail might still occur (only if it is relatively targeted, and thus much more likely to produce an inquiry). But cutting out 97% of spam would be a good help.

(Of course, either this solution or the taxation one would require difficult technical changes to the email protocol, and of course there'd first have to exist a viable micropayment service)

Re:a really bad idea

[TheOneEyedMan]

Why not imagine this as part of a hybrid solution for fighting spam. Use white-lists for your private corespondance. However, to reduce the reqirements for whitelisting all commercial and government sites, just allow them to run the whitelist, charging a penny an email checked against the whitelist. The whitelist authenticates the email is from the proper sender, pgp signs it and forwards it to you. Then add them to a special white list. YOu could even have several private firms that do this and have them compete on price and quailty of service.

Re:a really bad idea

[ajs]

You're assuming too much. You mention micro-payments... Would you require that I pay $0.01 per recipient to send a question to the Linux kernel mailing list? What if I send mail to "support@somesoftwarecompany.com" and that happens to point to their external support partner and several internal addresses?

Who collects this? If I have an account with an ISP, do they give me the micro-cash? Wow, I need to get on a lot of mailing lists and fast!

Does the ISP collect it? Wow, I can just see it... hmm, I yesterday the botte-cap-collectors@junkshop.com email list had 2 members, but now "perlscript0x0001@bigisp.net" through "perlscript0xffff@bigisp.net" are subscribed to the list... that's odd. Huh, I wonder who I should send the check to for the $650 that it just cost me to send the "bottle cap of the day" message out.

Re:a really bad idea

[Reziac]

And if we had to pay for messages received from currently-free mailing lists -- well, most such are a matter of convenience or amusement, not necessity, and sure as hell not worth paying for. Just the mailing list posts that I *archive* come to around 2000 per year, and I delete-after-use about 4 times as many as I archive. At a penny a pop, that's around $100 a year just to receive stuff like "reply to your post on slashdot" notices. Never mind that some people's merely personal email comes to a couple hundred messages a day.

Imagine the micropayment nightmare for an otherwise-free mailing list with 200,000 subscribers! Not to mention the bill if you're charged to send each email.

And the problem with taxes, is that they always go up. It'd be just a matter of time before a one cent per email tax rises to the same as it costs to send snailmail. And of course, taxing email won't do a damned thing to reduce spam that didn't originate in the U.S.

Re:a really bad idea

[Uruk]

Enforcement would be a nightmare, but the system wouldn't even work. Currently corporations spend quite a bit of money to send out snail-mail spam. That has a solid cost attached to it for printing, distribution, and postage. That cost is well above $0.01 per piece, and obviously it's still profitable. I used to work for a company that would be thrilled to get a 2% response rate to their snail mail spamming.

The fact that email is easy to send, quick, and allows you to quickly reach many people is what makes spam so popular. The fact that it's currently free of course doesn't exactly hurt, but in order to reduce the levels of spam, some arbitrarily chosen fee won't work. The fee should be roughly the same as regular postage if you really want to reduce spam. (Even then there would still be a lot since it would be cheaper than snail mail spamming given no printing costs)

Consumers would NOT go for a postage rate charge on every email - it might largely kill the utility of email. Of course all of this really is moot since given the way SMTP is put together from the ground up, it would be near impossible to enforce. We always could of course set up a worst of both worlds scenario - everybody who sends legitimate email pays, and the spammers skirt the tax.

Re:a really bad idea

[Minna Kirai]

Obviously, the transaction would be between just two endpoints. That's how existing SMTP works. Sending to a mailing list is just a single recipient (who happens to be a robot which will automatically forward to many others, engaging in it's own transactions with them, and generally skipping anyone who won't accept the message for free).

The admin of the mailing list can set any price he desires to post to it. Since an ML is a recipient multiplier and a fat target for spam, they might choose $0.20 or $0.50 for a message. Of course, users can register as a poster to have fees waived for sending to an ML address (allow anyone to subscribe to recieved automatically. Subscribing to post for free takes either the admin or an existing subscriber sending you an invite, which'll prevent automated joining by spamware).

And $0.25 isn't too much for a non-subscriber who wants driver help from linux-kernel. It might even help keep down the noise from those guys who are wondering why RedHat 9 can't play MP3.

Re:a really bad idea

[ajs]

The admin of the mailing list can set any price he desires to post to it. Since an ML is a recipient multiplier and a fat target for spam, they might choose $0.20 or $0.50 for a message

I don't think it's a leagally tennable idea to make a mailing list charge for messages sent to it. For starters, by charging someone a fee, you implicitly accept a number of responsibilities for the prodcut or service.

You also cannot claim that someone is abusing your service when they paid you the money you asked for. Thus, bulk mailers no longer have to masquerade behind forged headers and such, they just proudly send mail to the largest 10 mailing lists they can find, pay their $2 fee and count their revenue stream....

Very bad, do not do.

And $0.25 isn't too much for a non-subscriber who wants driver help from linux-kernel

No not at all, but who's going to pay $0.25 to ANSWER? No one of course, so only private replies will be sent, but even then it's goign to cost SOMETHING.

Also, you're being US-centric. There are many countries that take part in US-based free software development lists and many other beneficial discussion venues who would be crushed by the exchange rate on a $0.25/per message fee! In some countries that would be enough to buy a meal, and I'm going to answer a technical question or contribute a patch... AND PAY FOR IT?!

Fee-based sending would be the death of electronic mail as we know it, and there are better solutions

Re:a really bad idea

[Crispen]

I agree with Danny on this one.

The penny a post tax sounds like a good idea at first, but the reality is that it would be the end of the large, free, opt-in mailing lists like Fred Langa's Langalist, Jack Teems' "Neat Net Tricks," and Bob Rankin's and my "Internet Tourbus."

Tourbus has 84,803 subscribers at last count, and we [try to] send out 2 posts a week. If the penny a post tax comes to pass, it will cost me almost $90,000 a year to send out my posts. That's almost twice as much as my entire student loans!

There has to be a better solution to the spam problem that wouldn't kill the Langalist ... and TechGuy ... and Woody's Windows Watch ... and Kuro5hin Email Digest ... and Lockergnome ... and Tourbus ... and ...

Re:a really bad idea

[Minna Kirai]

For starters, by charging someone a fee, you implicitly accept a number of responsibilities for the prodcut or service.

The software industry has a successful tradition of easily disclaiming any liablity regardless of charging huge fees.

No not at all, but who's going to pay $0.25 to ANSWER? No one of course, so only private replies will be sent, but even then it's goign to cost SOMETHING.

The regular users would have whitelisted accounts permitting them to send messages to it without paying.

The core of the "micropayment personal email stamp" proposal is that payments are configured by the individual recipient, including the possiblity of not charging different amounts to set patterns of sender address.

If such a system turns out to be inapplicable to large mailing lists (because they fan out to hundreds of readers, making even a heavy fee profitable for spammers), then the ML admins can simply set their email charge to $0, and be in exactly the same situation they are now.

But a micropayment-based system could still serve to protect individual accounts. It's not a flag-day; there's no need to replace existing SMTP mailers in one big, incompatible swoop.

Re:a really bad idea

[ajs]

The software industry has a successful tradition of easily disclaiming any liablity regardless of charging huge fees.

And the software industry does that by requiring a specfic EULA be accepted... are you suggesting that I will have to click-through on your Web site in order to send you mail?!

Micropayment based mail is a fiction. It simply cannot work on a large scale for the following reasons:

* It requires that incoming mail be able to generate a financial transaction. Picture the exchange exploit of the month having access to an electronic payment system. Oh baby, those are going to be some rich script kiddies!

* It allows for many forms of attack like spam (marked as refuse-to-pay) whose return address charges $0.25 per message. Of course, most users will not accept it, and even more will never reply, but then there's those few, and that's a business model. Your system will suffer a PR meltdown before you can get everyone to correctly configure their systems to avoid this, and some implementations will never be free of it.

* It's the "don't come into my neighborhood unless you pay at the gate" approach, and that creates closed communities. Sure, perhaps closed communities are cool at first, but when you find out how many people there are that you actually want to interact with, but who will never pay at the gate... you leave your little community and go downtown where the action is.

* By creating a payment system, you also impose a veneer of legitimacy. $0.01 per recipient? Well, that seems kind of high for your average fire-hose spammer, but it just forces folks to become more aware of demographics, etc. If you can get up around the 2% response rate that even average targetted, physical bulk mail enjoys, then you start profiting even if your product costs only $1! Turn on the TV after 2AM and watch carefully. All of those products will be the ones that fill your inbox as soon as micro-payments make it seem less like a den of hustlers and degenerates.

Re:a really bad idea

[Minna Kirai]

* It requires that incoming mail be able to generate a financial transaction. Picture the exchange exploit of the month having access to an electronic payment system. Oh baby, those are going to be some rich script kiddies!

I hope so- it might drive Microsoft out of the server space once and for all.

However, we actually wouldn't get rich script kiddies- just jailed ones. Transactions leave trails. Maybe they can root the mail server and clean their tracks (although kiddies don't usually bother, if they even know how), but compromising the micropayment server and/or the creditcard company will be a different magnitude of challenge.

It's the "don't come into my neighborhood unless you pay at the gate" approach, and that creates closed communities.

We have those communities today. Downtown London, for instance. They're still public places- anyone can get in with a 10 note. A true suburban-royalty "Gated Community", on the other hand, says "don't come in unless you're on the list". Strangers have no opportunity to pass through at all, no matter how much they need or want to. This is less fair, and less inclusive.

If nothing else is done to stop spam, we'll see people start to auto-drop anything not on their friends&family&coworkers whitelist.

All of those products will be the ones that fill your inbox as soon as micro-payments make it seem less like a den of hustlers and degenerates.

A marginal improvement, then. And if you don't like it, dial the value up more and more.

Micropayment email isn't an alternative to crypto solutions which confirm senders' identities- it's a backup, a backdoor. (After all, confirmed identities is a prerequistite for implementing the money exchange). If any system is created which locks out unsolicited email from strangers, you may miss out on some communications (stereotypically a high-school sweetheart) that you would rather have gotten. Even if the price was $5 (macropayment?), email fees would allow dedicated individuals to reach you in an emergency, preventing corporations from feeding their grinders.

By the tenets of capitalism, the best and fairest way to prevent abuse of a free resource is to "internalize the costs".

Re:a really bad idea

[ajs]

Ok, you're editing what I say with a very biased skew (e.g. keeping the part about gated communities, and deleting the bit about how that plays in the real world), so I wish you luck. Personally, I'm not going to charge my friends to send me mail....

In the words of George Harrison...

[restive]

If you drive a car-car I'll tax the street
If you try to sit-sit I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk I'll tax your feet
Tax man

Honestly, folks, this is not an original attempt at problem solving here. This is the kind of thing that ordinary ninnies in the U.S. legislature think up.

Re:In the words of George Harrison...

[sckeener]

Ah the old saying: If all you've got is a hammer, everthing begins to look like a nail.

The sad part is politicans have access to a variety of hammars, but continue to pound the 'people' nail with the 'tax' hammar.

Re:In the words of George Harrison...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you drive a car-car I'll tax the street
If you try to sit-sit I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk I'll tax your feet
Tax man

Before you go too far in bashing all taxes, though, just remember where paved streets and sidewalks come from.

Tax collection would be near impossible

[chrisbw]

I can't even begin to imagine how difficult it would be to assess and collect on these taxes. Yeah -- spam sucks -- but not enough to start paying more taxes for it. You would begin to unnaturally add costs to something that's supposed to be a cost-saver.

Re:Tax collection would be near impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, first they'll need to establish a clear identity for the sender and reciever of e-mails; they can't collect taxes if they don't know who to collect them from...

So, instead of just stopping these people (now that we'll know who they are), we'll just pay more taxes on something that used to be free.

Re:Tax collection would be near impossible

[drnlm]

Please submit your email logs along with your tax return.

And of course we expect that the people we claim to be most interested in stopping by this will be completely honest here. Otherwise somebody's going to have to try and reconcile all the logs and see if people recieved more email from joespam@spam.com than he has claimed sending. Imagine doing that for every hotmail address.

Not to mention all the logical inconsicencies such a system will introduce - If I send email to another person on the same network, I have used company provided hardware and cabling - no external resources, so why should I pay tax on that. In many cases, that email is just copying a message from one place on the server to another. Yet we will be expected to pay the government 1c for services rendered.

And then the fun that starts when everybody else starts taxing email. Messages to the UK bounce because their tax system is different from the US's, and so on and so forth.

Mailing lists?

[Matt_Bennett]

Some of us still run mailing lists to connect a group of friends- who pays then? It is a perfectly legitimate use... but it seems scary if I'm would have to register my mailing list to get an 'exemption'

I think the biggest failing in this is that to tax email would require a massive change to the email infrastructure- just send all email through your government approved relay. Sure- they won't look at it... putting this on top of SMTP- I don't think it would work- what would be the incentive to use it (other than possibly spam free email)?

Re:Mailing lists?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple solution.

1) host a pop3 mail3-server for your friends only
on a non-standard, ssl-encrypted port
2) give your friends an account there
3) profit! (since you won't have to pay taxes)

(profit joke is only coincidental)

Chilling effect on public free forums.

[torpor]

I run ampfea.org. We have been an open, free, highly communicative community for the last 6 years, surviving solely on contributions (donations) made by members to keep our services alive. We've done okay with it, but it hasn't been easy at times.

Now, adding *tax* to our e-mail (most of our forums are based on mailing list traffic) would completely cut down on the ability for members to communicate freely. Tax on e-mail is a *BAD* idea.

There are plenty of effective ways to deal with the SPAM problem. Tax is not one of them. Tax is never a solution to any problem.

Re:Chilling effect on public free forums.

[Hellraisr]

I wonder if you would be referred to as a charity or non-profit organization. Those are generally free from tax in the USA are they not? (I'm from Canada so I'm not sure).

In that regard, it also would allow for a loophole where you could still get spam from non-profit organizations. But that's hardly as bad as the stuff that comes into my inbox on the average day.

Re:Chilling effect on public free forums.

[cHiphead]

obviously anyone proposing an email tax doesnt spend much time on an oft used mailing list. im sorry but a forum system just isn't the same as a true list serv in which each individual has an archive of posts vs. a server only archive. no losing stuff b/c someone else screwed something up.

Re:Chilling effect on public free forums.

[zackbar]

So now people who run mailing lists would have to file paperwork with the federal government to be classed as a charity?

I can just see the IRS forms now.

I just love the solutions people envision. There's a problem. Let's throw the government at it. They can fix ANYTHING.

The top level poster is right. This will probably kill spammers. Unfortunately, it will do it by killing email.

What will happen is that emailing people will be too painful due to taxes or the red-tape involved. People will switch to using alternatives or just stop using email altogether.

Re:Chilling effect on public free forums.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tax is never a solution to any problem."

Bwah!

Overstate much?

Re:Chilling effect on public free forums.

[LordKane]

That's the problem with people. I see it every day. They want their life improved, they want things they don't like fixed, but they want someone else to pay for it.
What would be wrong with some kind of fee for email? Perhaps a system with a lower limit even? I mean, there are a lot of stipulations you could drop in a fee system like this that would keep common users free from charges. Fee would only fall to the heavier users, both spammers and non-spammers alike.
Yes, listservs and newsletters would be charged, but they are heavy users of the system. The cause may be benevolent in your mind, and thusly should be free from charges, but that same fluff is in the minds of the spammers as well. I mean, your still using bandwidth, and still using up cycle time on the routing servers, so why shouldn't you have to pay like the spammers? You know spammers would be paying way more than a listserv anyway.
A simple fee based on a (monetary cost) per (measurable unit) could be charged by the sending ISP, who keeps track of the recipient server AND every server it passes, and divides the payment accordingly. Of course, it would only amount to anything over a long enough time, or when enough is sent (heavy users). Single emails would not be a big burden, and so could escape the charge. This could really help cover costs that anti-spammers say is destroying the net and their lives. :) Granted there are issues trying to enforce this, etc, but if it was run at the ISP and backbone level, they could certainly deny mail that was not headered as a paying customer, thus keeping a good deal of the international spammers at bay as well.
Having the government control the fee would probably be a bad idea, but leaving it to the ISPs or another regulatory body my work.

Re:Chilling effect on public free forums.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, a hotmail address. Way to invalidate your own argument.

Re:Chilling effect on public free forums.

[torpor]

I'm *ALREADY* paying for my bandwidth usage and we own the box we run on, thanks to donations made by our existing contributing members.

Add to that yet *another* bill in the form of a tax for each email message? No way, no thanks. We'll just move our box somewhere more friendly to a democratic, free way of thinking, and avoid all police states entirely ...

Re:Chilling effect on public free forums.

[LordKane]

Well, a spammer is *ALREADY* paying for his bandwidth usage, and probably owns the box he uses to send. What's your point? His content might suck, but someone might say the same for your content if they don't like it. My point is that heavy use is not just a spam thing, though they are the heaviest and most problematic. You can't simply stick one group wit the bill for everyone and call it fair. Why not have everyone chip in a usage fee if they exceed a certain usage amount? If the ISP's or some other regulatory non-government body is properly collecting and distributing these fees, what is the problem? How is that a police state? From a spammers point of view, it might look like your trying to push a police state on them. But then again, their spammers, and they deserve it, right? Boy, I can't wait till someone starts saying the same thing about you and your ways some day. Who will be left to speak out for you then?

Re:Chilling effect on public free forums.

[torpor]

Ummm... if someone doesn't like our content, its only because they *SUBSCRIBED themselves* to the box, and even then they've got a choice: unsubscribe, and never hear from the ampfea.org community again.

The problem here is SPAM: un-requested, un-related, non-sequitur e-mail being sent to thousands of people indiscriminately.

*WE DO* discriminate between those that want to be involved and those that don't. So, we've got to be taxed as a solution to the problem created by those who do not discriminate?

As for your "who will be left..." point ... well, lets just say that if communication is taxed, there won't be anyone left to say much at all about anything any more.

Thank you, Spam GODS!!!

Re:Chilling effect on public free forums.

[LordKane]

Thank you for the lesson on what spam is, but that does not answer the question. I'm not looking for an anti-spam rant. In fact, if your plan on responding with another, don't bother, it's very off topic. I'm not talking about spam. The issue at hand is charging for sending email. The proposed major benefit would be to curb spam some. And actually, this particular sub thread is about how this fee system could effect newsletters and listservs.

Your still using heavier than normal bandwidth, as well as cycle time for all the backbone servers along the way. I'm not sure how many member you have that you mail to, but say it's only 400.

Well, if there were some sort of lower limit, you would probably not be paying anything extra, or at least not much. This lower limit could even be based on the bandwidth your paying for. T1 lines would have a higher "prepaid" email amount than a common Cable/DSL/56K consumer line. Then all forms of normal use, even for businesses, would probably still be free. Only people using the bandwidth specifically for mailing would end up paying anything. Maybe even allow non-profit or educational sites or corporations to be exempt from the fee. That might add a charitable side to it.

I don't care if your spamming or not, if your using more than everyone else, why should you not pay a little extra?

I mean, heck, if I use your definition of spam, if that is what I can call the above, then I could grab 100 names out of an appropriate Mac Convention /. thread, and email them about a small user group convention I'm hosting online this weekend. It may be unsolicited, but it's not unrelated. It's called targeted emailing. I'm still advertising my event, but it's not spam by your definition. Should I have to pay for those email if only spam was charged a fee in the proposed system? I doubt the above is your definition of spam though, and I'm willing to bet your real definition mostly relegated to unsolicited email.

Finally, I'm not sure what you mean by your last bit. I mean, all forms of communication are taxed or involve a fee of some sort, except for those forms of communication you do with your own body, like simple speech or sign language. Cable, Phones, Internet, especially postal mail, all give a cut to government as a whole in some way. As it stands now, technically almost all communication is taxed, but there seem to be a lot of people saying a lot about everything.

broken record

[GigsVT]

I probably sound like a broken record, but a plan like this one closes the door on lots of legitimate uses of email.

Thousands of email lists such as those hosted on Sourceforge would be shut down by a plan like this one, as well as killing lists like the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which sends millions of messages a year.

Also gone would be the days of the open mailing list, where people can send a message to the list without being subscribed, as is common in the open source world.

In short, this proposal guarantees that the only people able to use legitimate email lists will be large companies with the budget to spam. I got an unsolicited email from Wachovia this morning, apparently since I had a First Union account, they turned on all the marketing "spam me" options in my profile when the two merged.

I don't see how this tax will deter these semi-legitimate corporate spammers.

Enforceable?

[Surak]

First off, how the fsck do they intend to even enforce something like that? I can setup an e-mail server on a *nix box in 5 minutes. (Literally, I know I've done it). How do you account for how many e-mails a user sent?

Secondly, what about businesses? We probably send at least a few hundred (non-spam) e-mails a day out to the public Internet where I work, we'd get hit pretty hard.

And lastly, this is just an other tax, another form of revenue generation. We don't NEED more taxes. I'm sick to death of the government sticking out its greedy little hand. Go AWAY! I already pay tax on everything I buy, every drop of gas I put in my car, every cigarette I smoke, every drop of alcohol I consume, and every dollar I make. I pay property taxes, and I pay a form of tax when I go to the state parks to camp. I pay a tax to license the car I drive, and to just have the privelege of being able to drive.

No, I'm sick of it. Put your greedy little hand back in your pocket and go away!

Re:Enforceable?

[liposuction]

A - FRICKEN - MEN.

TAX TAX TAX TAX TAX TAX TAX TAX TAX

If they'd use the obscene amounts of money they already stole from me in an efficient manor, maybe they wouldn't need quite so much.

Re:Enforceable?

[gonvaled]

I am not convinced that a tax on e-mail would be a good thing, but I would like to reply to the other claims you made:

1 - You pay taxes on everything you buy because you can buy it. Theses taxes are (should be?) used to construct/run/maintain services and infraestructure which can be used by everybody (even by those who can not buy things and thus pay those taxes)

2 - If the long term effects (those which we are barely starting to feel) of oil consumption where taken into account, and the petrol taxes had to cover the costs of cleaning the environment, you would be paying a lot more taxes for every drop of gas you put in your car - we already do that in Europe. Things being as they are, we are proffiting from the natural resources now and we are not even thinking about how will our children clean the mess we have left behind.

3 - Our society knows that tabac and alcohol consumption causes diseases very costly to cure. When you get ill because of tabac (I wish you won't, but on average you will), you will want to receive that costly treatement. Because I choose not to smoke, I do not want to pay for this treatment - I want to pay taxes, but I want them invested in other things, not on things which can be easily avoided. If you freely choose to smoke (which I think you should be able to), you should also think about the consequences - this is the same as with petrol.

4 - You pay property tax because you are rich enough to buy a house: by paying it, you support everybody.

5 - The taxes you pay for your car are related to the petrol taxes mentioned above.

I think it is time to realize that not everybody is living the american dream.

Re:Enforceable?

[Surak]

1 - You pay taxes on everything you buy because you can buy it. Theses taxes are (should be?) used to construct/run/maintain services and infraestructure which can be used by everybody (even by those who can not buy things and thus pay those taxes)

*snip*

4 - You pay property tax because you are rich enough to buy a house: by paying it, you support everybody.

What you're essentially saying is that it is the job of government to redistribute wealth and make it 'fair' for everyone else.

What I'm saying is, no it isn't. I don't know how it is in Europe, but here in States we have a system that was setup on 'equal opportunity', not 'equal outcome'. Opportunity and outcome are not the same thing.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't help to support the poor. But what I am saying is that it's not the government's place to do that. That's up to private individuals and private organizations. This is why we have charities.

Government redistribution of wealth through taxes is socialism, pure and simple. It's the stuff of Marx and Lenin, not the stuff of Jefferson and Franklin.

What you're saying here

Re:Enforceable?

[macrom]

We probably send at least a few hundred (non-spam) e-mails a day out to the public Internet where I work, we'd get hit pretty hard.

Not really. If you RTFA, then you'd know that the tax is only $.01/per e-mail sent. So that few hundred a day would cost your company a little over $1000 a year. If your business can't afford that, I'd say you're in some other hot water.

Not that I agree with all of this, I'm just trying to refute the statement that your company would be hit hard by the tax.

Re:Enforceable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Government redistribution of wealth through taxes is socialism, pure and simple. It's the stuff of Marx and Lenin, not the stuff of Jefferson and Franklin.

Funny how a vast majority of the population would prefer ideas behind socialism over capitalism without even realizing it!

Re:Enforceable?

[BKX]

Smoking is like that crazy music video that looks like a computer game from the late 80s:

"Can't stop. Can't stop. Can't stop the beat. Won't stop. Won't stop. Won't stop the beat." (Squirrel takes four shots of tequila.)

Re:Enforceable?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're operating at a loss for the first few years of business, even $100 on ANYTHING a year is a BIG expense!

Just imagine that $1000 a year directly eating into your salary...

Re:Enforceable?

[gonvaled]

What you're essentially saying is that it is the job of government to redistribute wealth and make it 'fair' for everyone else.
What I'm saying is, no it isn't. I don't know how it is in Europe, but here in States we have a system that was setup on 'equal opportunity', not 'equal outcome'. Opportunity and outcome are not the same thing.
It is very difficult to guarantee equal opportunity when you have widely differing social backgrounds. Did you have the same opportunities as Mr G.W. Bush? The fact that some people achieve great goals starting from below is remarkable, but it is not a prove that they had the same opportunities. It is very well exploited by the government propaganda, but it is statistically unsignificant.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't help to support the poor. But what I am saying is that it's not the government's place to do that. That's up to private individuals and private organizations. This is why we have charities.
It should not be a 'right' to help people from starving, but an obligation. This is achieved with taxes. I am not claiming the establisment of an "equal outcome" policiy, as you mentioned above, but the establisment of a "minimum outcome" policy.
Government redistribution of wealth through taxes is socialism, pure and simple. It's the stuff of Marx and Lenin, not the stuff of Jefferson and Franklin.
It happens to be called socialism, but that is not very important. It is the right thing to do. Authorities are of little interest when it comes to solving social problems. It is not who said that, but what they said. Unluckily, socialism is a doomed word in the US (and it is rapidly becoming a doomed word in Europe)

Re:Enforceable?

[joshsisk]

For a small business, suddenly having to pay $1000 for something that used to be free _is_ a big expense. That's the price health coverage for one employee, or a nice workstation - for something that used to be free.

Re:Enforceable?

[gonvaled]

I am sorry, but I do not understand your comment. Could you clarify?

Re:Enforceable?

[Minna Kirai]

What you're essentially saying is that it is the job of government to redistribute wealth and make it 'fair' for everyone else.

Like it or not, that is the behavior of every major government, including the US. He "essentially said" a simple, observable fact.

here in States we have a system that was setup on 'equal opportunity', not 'equal outcome'.

Property taxes are primarily collected by local governments, and the largest expenditure of local governments is public education, which directly supports the "Equal Opportunity" goal.

Government redistribution of wealth through taxes is socialism, pure and simple.

It might more accurately be termed "kleptocracy". "Socialism" is too specific.

Re:Enforceable?

[letxa2000]

It is very difficult to guarantee equal opportunity when you have widely differing social backgrounds.

The opportunities should be the same for everyone. That doesn't mean that everyone can or will take advantage of those opportunities, but the opportunities aren't made unavailable to them due to the nature of their social background.

Did you have the same opportunities as Mr G.W. Bush?

I feel I do. He decided he wanted to be president. Great. I'm a software engineer. But the opportunity to become president is available to me, too, if I'm willing to put up with all the BS that is required of everyone to get there.

It should not be a 'right' to help people from starving, but an obligation.

Hmmm, I think you are probably morally right--but the government isn't the organization that should make that moral decision for me and isn't the organization that should forcefully take my money to pay for what someone else has decided is the morally correct thing to do.

Charities should do this. Charities should feed the poor, and help the homeless. If you have food on the table and a place to sleep you shouldn't be on the government tit, period.

It happens to be called socialism, but that is not very important.

Wrong-o. Socialism failed because it is a dream, a utopia. Even though YOU might think it's the "right" thing to do or just because its GOALS might seem morally right, in reality it doesn't work, is not in-line with real human nature, and comes down to someone else (the government) deciding how others (the people) MUST spend THEIR money. That's wrong.

Re:Enforceable?

[nlh]

That's the price health coverage for one employee

Oh man do I wish that were true. Here in New York, that's the price of decent health coverage for one employee for TWO MONTHS. One month if you're talking about family coverage. Bleh.

Re:Enforceable?

[mortonda]

Do you own a business? Would you care to justify that thought?

I own an ISP, and I don't have room in the budget for the cost that an email tax would place on us. Not to mention the cost of the hardware needed to run the accounting for all email messages.

Re:Enforceable?

[sentanta]

I think that everyone, except for the hard core libertarians, feel that some taxation is necessary, but one of the points not emphasized here is that our current tax levels should be sufficient to provide a minimally acceptable lifestyle for everyone. That has not been the truth in practice because of governmental inefficiencies. A $20,000 toilet seat anyone?

Another problem is that many (NOT ALL) civil servants are concerned with their budgets and not the function of the job. In NYC recently, the transit authority misrepresented their books to show a deficit when they ad a $300mm surplas. The truth came out eventually, but only after a 30-40% fare hike was implemented.

It's not always a lack of concern for the less fortunate that angers people about paying taxes.

Re:Enforceable?

[gonvaled]

It is very difficult to guarantee equal opportunity when you have widely differing social backgrounds.

The opportunities should be the same for everyone. That doesn't mean that everyone can or will take advantage of those opportunities, but the opportunities aren't made unavailable to them due to the nature of their social background.

I think you did not get the main point here. Of course in the Constitution of the US and in any constitution in any democratic country, there are explicit statements about equality of rights. That does not mean that people actually are able to exercise those rights, because their environment is such that they are concerned about a dozen other things (like trying to eat tonight) that prevent them to do so. That is, theory and practice diverge a lot here. For people to be able to exercise their rights, they need a minimum standard of living, standard that is guaranteed by social policies.

Did you have the same opportunities as Mr G.W. Bush?

I feel I do. He decided he wanted to be president. Great. I'm a software engineer. But the opportunity to become president is available to me, too, if I'm willing to put up with all the BS that is required of everyone to get there.

I am sure you didn't. While you spent some years of your life trying to save to buy a house, he was free to do whatever it pleased him, because he had that necessity already covered. My point here is that although you have teorethically the same rights and the same oportunities, your starting point in life is extremely different. I grant that in most cases those "different starting points" are a by-product of the system and probably should not be eliminated. In some cases though, that requieres intervention.

It should not be a 'right' to help people from starving, but an obligation.

Hmmm, I think you are probably morally right--but the government isn't the organization that should make that moral decision for me and isn't the organization that should forcefully take my money to pay for what someone else has decided is the morally correct thing to do.
Charities should do this. Charities should feed the poor, and help the homeless. If you have food on the table and a place to sleep you shouldn't be on the government tit, period.

If we accept that charities must help the poor, we accept that this is a voluntary act. If we accept that it is a voluntary act, we must accept that nobody will want to voluntarily help, and that those people in need will starve. By putting the burden on the government, you prevent that a few number of people - those very little people who can not accept human suffering - are put up with the task of helping those who are in need.

It happens to be called socialism, but that is not very important.

Wrong-o. Socialism failed because it is a dream, a utopia. Even though YOU might think it's the "right" thing to do or just because its GOALS might seem morally right, in reality it doesn't work, is not in-line with real human nature, and comes down to someone else (the government) deciding how others (the people) MUST spend THEIR money. That's wrong.

Human nature has plenty of horrible twists. The goal of an organized society is not to accept those defects, but to correct and limit them, all the while preserving the freedom of the individual.

Re:Enforceable?

[2short]

"...comes down to someone else (the government) deciding how others (the people)..."

"The government" is not someone else. It is the people, exercising their collective will. You can argue about whether it uses the right methods to determine that will, or how effective it is at exercising it, and I'll either debate you or agree with you. But your assertion that the govenrment imposed by some entirely external force (space aliens perhaps?) is just the typical, tired straw man of those who want to assume that they speak for "the people".

On a tangent, you seem to really believe that if had decided you wanted to be president, you would have had similar chances to G. W. Bush. Given that, I guess I'd better clarify: I was joking about the space aliens.

Re:Enforceable?

[joshsisk]

Seriously? Wow... my employer paid $80 a month for me at my last job. I paid $60.

Re:Enforceable?

[Surak]

I think you did not get the main point here. Of course in the Constitution of the US and in any constitution in any democratic country, there are explicit statements about equality of rights. That does not mean that people actually are able to exercise those rights, because their environment is such that they are concerned about a dozen other things (like trying to eat tonight) that prevent them to do so. That is, theory and practice diverge a lot here. For people to be able to exercise their rights, they need a minimum standard of living, standard that is guaranteed by social policies.

I think *you* did not get the main point. *I* came from a poor, white trash family. In many ways, I had LESS opportunities available to me than most inner city African Americans or hispanics *because* I'm white. I went to school got a degree and got a good job, despite the fact that neither I nor my family *ever* received *any* goverment handouts. I'm a Unix sysadmin, and I'm paid well for it. So yes, you *can* pull out of poverty if you're willing to work hard for it. Most people on the government tit *aren't* willing to lift a finger. Why should they? They get free food and free money from the government.

Re:Enforceable?

[macrom]

Yes, I do business sometimes as an LLP with a friend. While I wouldn't relish the thought of more taxes, I would be able to build the taxes into my budget. Unfortunately, for most businesses, this new cost would probably be translated into higher costs (slightly, though) for the customer.

Re:Enforceable?

[davburns]

Yes, enforcability is going to be a big problem here.

Even if people weren't discouraged from sending legit emails (your example is one where people would be!), $0.01 per email is not enough to cover the cost of counting the number of emails people send, even if everybody played fairly. Spammers probably aren't going to play fairly. They will deliver their spam, and either try to make it tax-free, or put it on somone else's bill. (they already forge return addresses so others have to deal with bounces and comlaints.)

Another problem with this is that it will appear to legitimise tax-paying spammers. Even with the $0.01 tax, it's still a lot cheaper than paper mail, and so spammers will try to take advantage of that. But the recipients don't get that $0.01, while they (and their ISPs) are using resources to deal with the spam.

I still think that the solution to spam requires three parts:

• Make unsolicited bulk email illegal (like fax-spam). This means that a spammer has a real cost to deal with for even trying to spam.
• Filter as much as reasonably possible. This means most spam won't get through.
• Never buy from a spammer, even if they sell what you want.

Re:Enforceable?

[letxa2000]

That does not mean that people actually are able to exercise those rights, because their environment is such that they are concerned about a dozen other things (like trying to eat tonight) that prevent them to do so.

Again, if someone is truly not able to eat tonight I would not oppose the government feeding that person, even though I think charities should handle that kind of thing. But the current situation being what it is I would agree with the government making sure everyone is fed.

For people to be able to exercise their rights, they need a minimum standard of living, standard that is guaranteed by social policies.

While I agree that society should--either through government or preferably through charities--make sure everyone can eat, I don't think there is or should be any minimum standard of living that society guarantees anyone. Society guarantees that everyone has the same opportunity. Society cannot guarantee equality of results and can't even guarantee that we all start with the same resources available to us--and yes, that means that some luxuries in life might not be available to everyone. I'd love to have my own Learjet but that just isn't possible right now; but just because I can't have one doesn't mean someone else shouldn't be able to get one. We are all different and are born to different families with different standards of living and that's a fact of life that society can't change.

While you spent some years of your life trying to save to buy a house, he was free to do whatever it pleased him, because he had that necessity already covered.

First, I don't even have a house yet. I'm still renting.

That said, I insist I have the same OPPORTUNITIES that President Bush has or had. No, I don't have the same wealth. But wealth != opportunity. I have the same *opportunity* to run for governor, president, etc. as he did. Society can't stop me. Sure, I might have to work harder than he did but the same opportunities exist. The fact that he has/had it easier doesn't mean he has opportunities I don't, it was just easier for him to take advantage of them.

your starting point in life is extremely different.

So what? I'm sorry, but that's a fact of life. You might not think it's fair (and perhaps it isn't), but it's a fact of life. It's not going to change. Any theory--economic or political--has to be based on realities, and the reality is that we are all born into different families which give us different starting points in life.

All society can do is make sure those that start at zero aren't automatically and legally out of luck. Through hard work I feel I could achieve the same thing as President Bush has, if that were my desire. He had it easier, so what. Basically "baseline" should be that "If you want to be successful in live, it requires a lot of hard work." If certain people are lucky and born into rich families that doesn't mean the general expectation should change. To succeed in life is hard and I don't have a problem with that.

If we accept that charities must help the poor, we accept that this is a voluntary act. If we accept that it is a voluntary act, we must accept that nobody will want to voluntarily help, and that those people in need will starve.

Your assertions are wrong in so many ways.

Many people already donate to charities even though this is a voluntary act and even though they are already paying 15-30% of their income to the federal government. The fact that donating to them is voluntary does NOT mean that no-one will want to help. In fact, I'd be inclined to donate MORE to my local church that I can see is using the money effectively to help the local homeless or hungry than I'd be asked to pay into the black void of the federal budget.

You also assume that the people of the country are too bad and selfish to help their neighbors but that the good, pure, unselfish and helpful people who are our politicians in Washington are nee

Re:Enforceable?

[BitterOak]

I can setup an e-mail server on a *nix box in 5 minutes. (Literally, I know I've done it). How do you account for how many e-mails a user sent?

Couldn't you just a few lines to sendmail which counts the number of e-mails a user sends, and at the end of the month print out a summary? Or use sendmail's existing logging features and write a perl script to go through the logs and generate a summary? Really, it doesn't sound that difficult. Or am I missing something here?

Re:Enforceable?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the absolute imbecile-speak of an idealist. There hasn't been a true democracy since the Greeks. To achieve such an exercise of collective will, it will require what the GOVERNMENT calls "revolution."

Re:Enforceable?

[Surak]

You *are* missing something. If setting up Postfix, Sendmail or is so easy, where is the accountability? Sure, my ISP can set up a perl script that goes through the logs and generates a summary, but what prevents *me* from setting up an e-mail server that *doesn't* count the number of mails I've sent?

(Hint: It's a rhetorical question. The answer is 'nothing.')

Re:Enforceable?

[BitterOak]

Sure, my ISP can set up a perl script that goes through the logs and generates a summary, but what prevents *me* from setting up an e-mail server that *doesn't* count the number of mails I've sent?

Those that have a mail server running would be responsible to keep track of the e-mail processed by that server. What's to stop the convenience store down the street from not keeping track of its sales and collecting state sales tax? What's to stop you from not reporting all of your income on your 1040? Sure, people cheat. But they can get in serious trouble if they are caught.

I'm not saying I'm in favor of an e-mail tax, but I don't think the accounting would be hugely difficult.

Re:Enforceable?

[gonvaled]

That said, I insist I have the same OPPORTUNITIES that President Bush has or had. No, I don't have the same wealth. But wealth != opportunity. I have the same *opportunity* to run for governor, president, etc. as he did. Society can't stop me. Sure, I might have to work harder than he did but the same opportunities exist. The fact that he has/had it easier doesn't mean he has opportunities I don't, it was just easier for him to take advantage of them.

I think it is highly understimated how important are environmental conditions for people to succeed in life. I'll give you a stupid example: a monkey, a panther and a fish are on the ground, right under a tree; somebody says: "the first to get to the top will get the prize". Obviously, everybody has the same opportunities. Nobody is going to stop the fish from climbing to the top. It just can't do it.

your starting point in life is extremely different.

So what? I'm sorry, but that's a fact of life. You might not think it's fair (and perhaps it isn't), but it's a fact of life. It's not going to change. Any theory--economic or political--has to be based on realities, and the reality is that we are all born into different families which give us different starting points in life.

All society can do is make sure those that start at zero aren't automatically and legally out of luck. Through hard work I feel I could achieve the same thing as President Bush has, if that were my desire. He had it easier, so what. Basically "baseline" should be that "If you want to be successful in live, it requires a lot of hard work." If certain people are lucky and born into rich families that doesn't mean the general expectation should change. To succeed in life is hard and I don't have a problem with that.

An advanced society characterizes itself by the way it handles their weakest members. Eventually, an advanced society should be such that guarantees success (happinness) to all its members.

If we accept that charities must help the poor, we accept that this is a voluntary act. If we accept that it is a voluntary act, we must accept that nobody will want to voluntarily help, and that those people in need will starve.

Your assertions are wrong in so many ways.

Many people already donate to charities even though this is a voluntary act and even though they are already paying 15-30% of their income to the federal government. The fact that donating to them is voluntary does NOT mean that no-one will want to help. In fact, I'd be inclined to donate MORE to my local church that I can see is using the money effectively to help the local homeless or hungry than I'd be asked to pay into the black void of the federal budget.

My statement was a logical one, with practical implications: if helping others is voluntary, we accept that eventually nobody will help (this is the logical part) Practically, this will not happen: somebody will try to help others, that is, those people who think human suffering should be avoided. The rest of the people - eventually most of the people - will go on living, caring only about their personal problems. In a system like this, it could *theoretically* happen that the people who most beneffit from society - those with a big wealth - are those who are contributing least to guarantee the standard of living. Please note that I am saying *theoretically*; that is, the system is flawed because it allows for this possibility - I do not suggest that this will be like this, but it could happen. A system which does not allow for this possibility is based on taxation, and more taxation for those who have most.

You also assume that the people of the country are too bad and selfish to help their neighbors but that the good, pure, unselfish and helpful people who are our politicians in Washington are needed to make us do the right thing.

I completely agree with you that political activity must be closely audited.

Re:Enforceable?

[letxa2000]

a monkey, a panther and a fish are on the ground, right under a tree; somebody says: "the first to get to the top will get the prize". Obviously, everybody has the same opportunities. Nobody is going to stop the fish from climbing to the top. It just can't do it.

But we're not talking about a human, a monkey, and a fish. These are all beings which are naturally different. The closest thing in the human condition that this example could apply to is an athelete, a light runner, and someone in a wheelchair--and telling them the first person that crosses the finish line will win a million bucks.

There is nothing inherently different about President Bush's abilities than my own (no wise-cracks eh!) other than that he has more money. While I don't deny that makes things easier for him, I don't accept that that means the opportunities don't exist for me.

Eventually, an advanced society should be such that guarantees success (happinness) to all its members.

I think you have your terms mixed up. That's not a society, that's utopia. Looks good in your imagination and on Star Trek, but reality? That's something else...

if helping others is voluntary, we accept that eventually nobody will help (this is the logical part)

Your "logical" assertion is disproven by reality. As I already said, no-one is forced to contribute to charities but tens of millions of Americans do so every year even though that comes out of what the federal government has decided to leave them with. If the federal government left them with more, by what logic do you conclude that nobody or fewer people would want to help?

The rest of the people - eventually most of the people - will go on living, caring only about their personal problems.

While I'll agree that not EVERYONE will help their neighbor, I'd say reality disproves that "most people" will not worry about their neighbor.

In a system like this, it could *theoretically* happen that the people who most beneffit from society - those with a big wealth - are those who are contributing least to guarantee the standard of living.

Hmmm. It seems that in our society those that have the most money are those that contribute the MOST to charities.

I do not suggest that this will be like this, but it could happen.

Yes, it could--if we assume that a reduction in federal taxes would cause a complete turnaround in basic human nature and generosity that is observed on a daily basis in our society.

A system which does not allow for this possibility is based on taxation, and more taxation for those who have most.

It's also dreadfully inefficient and open to evasion. You don't have to evade giving money to a charity. You do it because you want to and you believe it will truly help. The federal government has a history of wasteful spending and social problems with "good intentions" that fail or are so poorly implemented that one wishes that instead of sending a check for $5000 to the federal government, one could just go to the local homeless shelter and give it to them.

I'll even go one step further to meet you half way: Establish the federal tax rates, etc. Declare that of that, 25% MUST be sent to the federal government. The other 75% may, at the taxpayer's option, be given directly to an approved charity of their choice. Presumably "approved charities" would be those that demonstrate to the government that the vast majority (80%+?) of funds collected are used for assistance of the needy in their area or anywhere in the country. That way the government has some operating funds but taxpayers could choose to pay the rest to local charities that they can SEE are working and are almost always more efficient than the federal government since many of those that participate in them are volunteers themselves.

Uhm...and what if you have an e-mail virus?

[Ethelred Unraed]

So what if you're infected by an e-mail virus that spams everyone in your address book? Should you be held liable and therefore pay for sending e-mail you didn't mean or want to send? Should you be held liable for security flaws in software you have no control over?

Yes, you (usually) have control over *which* e-mail client you use -- but there is no totally secure e-mail client. (Or do we expect everyone to use mutt or pine?)

This sounds like a simple idea, but to me the implications are a lot worse than receiving spams.

My counter-suggestion (pulled fresh outta my butt) would be e-mail quotas. Each account would have a quota of, say, 100 e-mails (or perhaps 100 SMTP SEND reqs) a day -- any more than that and you pay.

Cheers,

Ethelred

Re:Uhm...and what if you have an e-mail virus?

[Arethan]

One quick question: How does giving the first 100 or so free prevent you from paying for email worms that continuously spam everyone in your address book? I have about 300 contacts in my address book at work. But even if I only had 5, by your idea, after 20 cycles of spams (which I would likely never see happening) I'd still start to pay for it.

Re:Uhm...and what if you have an e-mail virus?

[Anonymous Coward]

A quota would not work for very long ... just create 50 email accounts and you get to send 5000 messages ... who is going to stop you from opening all those free hotmail/yahoo/... accounts?

Or better, I just set up my mail server, automatically create user1, user2, ..., user5000000 and bingo! Mail galore ...

As for taxing email, in view of the return on effort for spammers, even 1 ct a mail would still make it worth their while. Just remember all the paper junkmail you get in your mail box ... that's not free and it still keeps coming.

Cheerio.

Re:Uhm...and what if you have an e-mail virus?

[Ethelred Unraed]

Like I said, the idea was freshly pulled outta my butt. ;-)

Still, the number could be raised, maybe to 500 a day (which is a hell of a lot for a private user). And/or the ISP would have to have a caveat in their TOS that you have to have the latest patches for your client, perhaps, to try and keep users from having to pay when they get an e-mail virus.

Corporate/power users could perhaps buy higher limits, with restrictions on type of mail being sent (UCE).

Still, this is something that could be done at the ISP level, rather than through taxation...

Cheers,

Ethelred

Re:Uhm...and what if you have an e-mail virus?

[stonedCoder]

re: quotas - that seems to be the most sensible and workable proposal anyone has put forward so far.

...and really, if someone's system is compromised by running freeporn.exe/open relay or whatever and they get hit for going over, then it's their own problem and maybe they'll be wiser in future. If you're not careful with your wallet and lose all your cash is it not your own fault? ;) Saying that, I'm sure if a quota system was in place and one day the amount of traffic was massively over a user's average, it would be easy to argue.

Re:Uhm...and what if you have an e-mail virus?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't see how a quota of 100 emails per day would stop spammers. It only means that the fake email addresses that they generate to send the spam would be limited to 100 emails each. That does not solve the problem. It only make the spammers think a little bit more about how to get that SEX SEX SEX spam to you!

Re:Uhm...and what if you have an e-mail virus?

[GroundWire]

I once thought of an idea, but I don't have the resources to develop it.

It's kinda like a quota, but not quite..

The idea is that everyone has a bucket of "points", each point in your bucket represents a message that you can send.

Once your bucket is empty, the rest of your messages are bounced/queued/or something else.

The key here - is when someone writes YOU a message, even if it's completely unrelated.. it GIVES you a point in your bucket.

The end result being spammers can't get their messages through, yet normal business can function (where people dialog back and forth, etc).. It would also work for listservs, if engineered properly. As the list would have its point bucket builtup by all of the posters.

This would all be enforced on the MDA side of the equation. Meaning YOUR ISP wouldn't deliver the message to you, unless it could communicate (out-of-bands probably) with the sender's ISP and confirm they have points left.

Anyone have any information about this, or whether this could actually fly? It makes perfect sense to me, at a very high-level. Now all that has to be done is figure out implementation details (a little more complex).

- Joel

Re:Uhm...and what if you have an e-mail virus?

[SN74S181]

I'm afraid there are more than a few of us here who won't weep if it costs you fifteen bucks or so for being an idiot and using software than enables your email account to spam two or three hundred of us at a time.

It could be an economic incentive to move away from that 'global address book' shit once and for all.

Read my lips

[squarooticus]

Can we please not give the government any more opportunities to tax us? Please?

bounces ?

[Anonymous Coward]

So would all the bounces that spammers use be classified as bounty candidates?

I'll just start a private class of millionares that hunts in the 24.x.x.x forest.

MUWWWAAAAHAAHAA!!!

Bad idea

[JimDabell]

Bye-bye mailing lists.

Bye-bye opt-in lists (hey, believe it or not, there are some products I am interested in).

Bye-bye email notifications whenever anybody replies to one of your comments on slashdot.

Bye-bye a million other valid uses of bulk mailings.

Re:Bad idea

[Duckling]

Not to mention:

Bye-bye free email services

Bye-bye anonymous email-services

Re:Bad idea

[chuckfirment]

>Not to mention:
>
>Bye-bye free email services
>
>Bye-bye anonymous email-services

Not a chance. I've been thinking about this and I think that free email services would definitely stay alive. In fact, I think they'd completely take off.

Any free email service that is outside of the United States is not regulated by US laws or taxes. Why should it be?

I'll be signing up for hotmail.uk.

Chuck

Re:Bad idea

[Duckling]

What makes you think the rest of the world won't catch on to this as well?

Imagine when spammers flee the US, to use accounts in other countries.

Everybody else is going to jump on the bandwagon to secure some of this cash. Those who don't will probably, with time, be forced to pay taxed services to send through their networks.
And, thus, most of the free and/or anonymous services will die.

Hell NO!

[s.a.m]

You've got to be fucking kidding me. Pay a penny per mail? Do you realize how much mail is sent outa my server per day? Fuck I'm not paying a couple of hundred bucks for something I give away for free!

I host several mailing lists and several other individuals with personal email accounts. This is all in good fun and I make no money from it. They want me to now PAY?! FUCK THAT! How the fuck you gonna regulate it? If you start charging for emails you're gonna fucking make millionares of a lot of sick twisted fucks out there who are just waiting for this to happen.

I'd rather take the spam than pay for emails. The lesser of the two evils in this case is spam...what has the world come to.

*throws hands up in air*

how?

[sabshire]

And just how do they think that this will be regulated? The only conceivable way would be ALL who control a mail server to consent to audits of their servers. NOT going to happen. What a STUPID idea!

Enforcement

[quantum bit]

And how exactly would this tax be enforced? Outlaw private mail servers? I don't think the people on the domains I host for my family and friends would be too happy about that.

Re:Enforcement

[e-gold]

...Customs and Excise officials aren't sent to jail when drugs come into the country, the smugglers are, if they can be caught.

If the US government put 1/2 the energy/money they've put into the enforcement of JUST the weed-section of the tax-and-spend war on (some) drugs, spam/UCE would be over in an instant. The problem isn't a lack of enforcement resources -- it's instead a lack of ENFORCEMENT ITSELF. By far the majority of spam I see is either quasi-criminal or blatantly-criminal *besides* being annoying-as-hell. If they can nab boats and Mercedes cars and homes from pot growers (or shoot non-grower Donald Scott!) they can damn sure also steal property from spammers -- IF they actually wanted to that is...

Getting the spammers (even if in another country) should be relatively-easy. Follow the money -- they're not concerned with the planet's penis-size, they're concerned with the size of their bank-accounts. I could, with the powers of the US government, cut WAY down on spam in less than a month. Why would anyone send it if some cop's going to confiscate the profits? And THAT PROFIT, my friends, NOT some damn intrusive & ineffective tax, should/could fund these cops.

The solution is simple, and akin to what happened after alcohol prohibition miserably-failed: the cops can keep their government jobs, but they must now focus on criminals rather than trying to make a weed God designed to help medical patients go extinct.

Suddenly, if they went after spam (even if they mostly failed miserably, as they're doing with weed, right now) and they'd be POPULAR, too. (Unlike now, when every one of the DEA agents I've ever known hasn't been too open about his job...)
JMR

Speaking ONLY for myself, no corporation would say all this anyway -- even if everyone knows it's true!

The beast gets a facelift

[SlashdotLemming]

Most of my mail (not email) goes straight into the trash/shredder. Why? its junk mail. And last time I checked, the senders of junk mail have to pay.
The game will change, but the results will be the same

Re:The beast gets a facelift

[Rhone]

Right. This wouldn't stop spam; it would only--in the eyes of the government--legitimize it.

Such an idea obviously isn't really about getting rid of spam. If you could implement the things that would be required for a tax--like some way of knowing the sender of every E-mail that is sent--then the actual taxation wouldn't even be necessary.

Re:The beast gets a facelift

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the US Post Office encourages junk mail. They even claimed loses because businesses use e-mail mass mailings instead of snail mail with the wide spread of the Internet.

They're also known for giving discounts for mass mailings. So if there is a tax, we'll often see discounts for 10000 or more; which makes it pretty cheap to spam the world... yet makes a helty profit (for whoever is running this show) out of average masses who now pay some tax.

Proof-of-work

[squarooticus]

Why not use HashCash or some other proof-of-work-based system? At least then I wouldn't be forking more of my money over to Uncle Sam for some transaction he has absolutely nothing to do with.

Uh ?

[stud9920]

Mailing list, anyone ? Free Software (technically as in beer) mailing lists, anyone ?

Oh dear

[johnburton]

Apart from the obvious technical problems that would make this unworkable I see one problem with having a tax on email and that is that once taxes are established, even in a "good" cause they because revenue raisers. I could see the amount starting to go up each year. And if I use something other than smtp via an isp to send my email, what happens then? It would probably become illegal to send messages other than via the proper taxed email system. You'd be a criminal for using ICQ as you'd be avoiding paying tax.

Re:Oh dear

[sirinek]

Kind of a sidetrack, does anyone even use ICQ anymore? I thought everyone was driven off of there by the endless stream of bots. My friends list of 250 people never seems to have more than 5-6 people online anymore.

Nice Idea, but .....

[Maliuta]

This is a nice idea, but for it to work the SMTP protocol would need to be re-written.

If we are to to take this lenght then why not just re-engineer the protocol so that only "trusted mail hosts" can transmit mail from one place to another, similar to the workings of DNS. By adding this level of security we could identify the actual individuals spamming and revoke their email privilages, it easier than taxing and works across national boundries.

beacuase lets get real about internat taxing, the only way for it to work is by international treaty and then we deal with who collects - and keeps - the "tax" (I think the obvious would be the ISP, in which case they can waive it if they feel the need). The reality is that not _all_places that exist would sign and some places would become spam havens.

If we are serious about ridding ourselves of the plaugue-o-spam we need to take a look at how we transport email from one place to another and then think of ways to tighten the loop so that people cannot just open a connection and send an million plus messagages wihtout identifying themselves fully.

Re:Nice Idea, but .....

[Anonymous Coward]

This brings up an interesting idea... if the new SMTP system were based on the current DNS implementation, then we could have E-ROOT servers and E-WHOIS. Example - You get email from domain.com... my mail server does an "e-whois" on domain.com and shows "Mail servers listed in order: mx1.domain.com, mx2.domain.com, etc." -just like a normal whois query. If the email isn't originating from one of the servers shown in e-whois, then it is dropped. Of course all email admins would need to register their email servers with a specified registrar, but they have to do that for their DNS servers anyway, and it really isn't that tough to do. If someone spams out through a legit mail server, then they are blocked from outgoing priviledges on that server.

-Kyler

Relaying & trojan smtps

[selderrr]

this taxation neglects the issues of virii that install smpt servers on John Q. Average's computer trhu which spam gets sent. Kinda hard to tax.

Additionally ,if such a bill passes, I can imagine tons of new virii popping up that use VB to send daisy chaned spam from one client to another.

Whitelists are the way to go for me.

Dumb Idea

[xigxag]

The problem to begin with is that spammers falsify their headers. Therefore under this plan, innocent people would get stuck with a tax bill. If there was a simple automatic process to trace the origin of spam to its source, then we could do that to begin with and simply block the true sender.

In other words, in order to properly implement a tax, we'd have to have already solved the spam problem, which would make the tax superfluous.

Re:Dumb Idea

[Reziac]

And if you can trace spam, you can trace all other emails. Bye-bye proxies and anonymous remailers (which can be important for some people -- frex, what if you don't want it known that you're participating in some [politically or socially incorrect] discussion list?)

Re:Dumb Idea

[xigxag]

And if you can trace spam, you can trace all other emails. Bye-bye proxies and anonymous remailers

No, that's not the case. There would be nothing stopping me (as an anonymous remailer host) from receiving your email, stripping all the headers, and forwarding it on my account to its intended recipient as From: Reziac via xigxag. However, if I allowed you to vicariously spam people through that method, then I'd have a problem with my own ISP.

Bull!

[PincheGab]

What's so hard to understand about actually enforcing a law that calls for legitimate and accurate headers on all e-mail? We don;t need taxes to deter spammers! Lawsuits and jail time are deterrent enough. Why add one more new tax? How will the e-mails be regulated? They wil have to come up with a new mail protocol, unless they require everyone running a mail server to file a yearly tax form! That would be worse than the spam!

Re:Bull!

[Minna Kirai]

law that calls for legitimate and accurate headers on all e-mail?

Internet users value the possibility of anonymity.

Better than a law to enforce accurate headers would be a technical solution- altered mail clients/servers which permit a user, at her option, to automatically disgard messages without a return address signed by a trusted authority (business opportunity?)

Allowing government regulators to get tightly coupled with mail-server enforcement would cause many of the same problems taxation would- beaureacratic overhead, compliance audits, etc. And once mail servers were monitored, it would be easier later on for the Feds to start taxing.

Implementation issues

[supercytro]

Ignoring legal and social issues for the moment, the underlying infrastructure for emails will need to undergo a change to stop spammers circumventing the charges i.e. using someone elses mail server and changing the headers such as from: However, it has potential... How about a new protocol allowing different charge amounts to be placed on the mails or for sender to pay recipient. Win-win for both parties?

Penny Post - but with refunds a better idea

[Cushman]

This has been suggested many times before. If we take such a drastic measure as to change SMTP to enable us to charge a penny per message, why not send that penny to the recipient? Then, the recipient can choose to refund the penny if he wanted the e-mail, and keep it if he didn't want the e-mail.

The only part that bothers me is having to have a bank account or micropayment system to send e-mail. It kinda takes away from the whole "freedom of the internet" thing.

No Internet Tax

[oddRaisin]

Taxation is only rational when the government actually provides a service. I realise that at the end of the posting, it said that revenues would go towards increasing bandwidth (like anybody believes that), but right now there are thousands of kilometers of dark fibre -- bandwidth ain't the issue.

To put forward idea that we pay taxes on e-mail is to display your ignorance of how e-mail works. If I set up an e-mail server at my own expense, and send an e-mail through it to another server, set up at the recipients own expense, I fail to see where the government's services come into it. After running a few traceroutes to my most common e-mail destinations, all the hops belonged to corporations, not the government.

And those are just the techno-political reasons why taxes don't make sense. What about internation e-mails. I live/work in Canada, but a lot of our business is international (States, UK, etc).

I also don't think that the spam-killers-for-hire is a good idea either (difficult to regulate, and a good chance of a lot of innocent bystanders getting hurt.)

I personally like signed e-mails, and much stiffer penalties for spammers. This may seem like a soft solution, but laws end up being the last recourse. As many on Slashdot jump at pointing out, technological barriers are easily overcome, especially by a large group of determined people.

Re:No Internet Tax

[Anonymous Coward]

Taxation is only rational when the government actually provides a service.

Don't worry .. the government will find a way to provide a service. Even if it's porridge while you're at a concentration camp.

Re:No Internet Tax

[SeanAhern]

Based on the criterion that the government should only tax that which it has a hand in, as it were, then you are probably also against many other taxes:

+ Sales tax
+ Income tax
+ Fishing/hunting licenses
+ Gasoline taxes
+ "Sin" taxes

But I'll go a bit farther. How is the government supposed to pay for services it provides where there is no direct taxpayer involvement? The biggest ones that come to mind are law enforcement and military defense. How do you propose that those be paid for?

Enforcement

[sql*kitten]

The problem with any anti-spam proposals is not making laws, it's enforcing them. The EU can pass all the anti-spam legislation it wants, but that doesn't help when the spam originates outside your jurisdiction. Deputize ISPs to fight it? Doesn't work; after all, Customs and Excise officials aren't sent to jail when drugs come into the country, the smugglers are, if they can be caught. The Post Office aren't responsible if someone sends unwanted junk mail.

It won't be long now before people only accept mail from known senders, and if you want to be on someone's list, you have to contact them by another means to get set up. That's how it is on ICQ right now, if you ignore everyone that you don't specifically permission, then even your friends can't contact you to ask to be permissioned, unless they use mail, the phone, etc. Once that happens, the spam problem will go away shortly afterwards, and the inconvenience will be minor. Even now, people have a "spam" account that they use when they need to register on a website, and a private one given only to friends. The signal-to-noise ratio makes it worthwhile; I abandoned Usenet years ago because S/N was too poor, closed mailing lists are far better. Slashdot was almost unusable for a while, then moderation and thresholds were introduced.

Spam's a real problem, but it's one that can be solved in a fairly straightforward way, and it will be as soon as more people get the support for "friends only" in their mail clients.

Article is lacking Technological Saavy

[DLG]

The idea that one could tax email per letter (not per bandwidth) is inane at best. It means that people will actually stop sending smaller email, the kind that really improves the ability to quickly communicate and respond to communications, and beyond that an effort will be made to economize on a business scale, by getting the most value for your 1 cent (video clips being emailed).

As a second issue, how does the government tax foreign entities for email? And who do you tax, when spam is notoriously made difficult to trace?

And beyond that, I can imagine the dozens, if not thousands, of hackers, just waiting to have this sort of incentive to develop a better SMTP, one that solves many of the problems and loopholes that SMTP currently causes.

Also the article suggests that the federal government should be creating an Federal sales tax on internet purchases. Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought I already paid state tax. Atleast I do with any company that is doing business properly. This doesn't seem different than the old style catalog sales, where you order something out of state to avoid tax. I know Apple charges state tax in NY.

Really for a publication called the financial times, this is not a very financially sensible or reality based article. it seems to be written by someone whose only experience in the internet is reading about it.

Re:Article is lacking Technological Saavy

[liposuction]

What about the fact that the government doesn't own or upkeep the internet? I mean, GODDAMN STOP TAXING ME FOR EVERYTHING!

"Sir that's perfectly good air, you didn't think it was free did you?"

Re:Article is lacking Technological Saavy

[catch23]

Or worse yet, some crazy hacker sets off a daemon on some remote company server that fires off millions of emails to random recipients. That would be a new way to bankrupt any company. It doesn't take too long to send off 100 million emails...

Re:Article is lacking Technological Saavy

[ipour]

Everyone thinks taxing is easy, but when it comes to sales or value added type of tax, any legislator or revenue official or accountant will tell you it is notoriously difficult.

First, when is the taxable event - when you send the e-mail or receive it? What about replies? What about size? Who is responsible for paying the tax - the sender, the receiver, the ISP? Who collects it? How do you enforce nonpayment? Who is going to take on the enforcement role? Where do the proceeds go?

Much as I don't like it, the solution really needs to revolve around a more direct approach, which is to say banning unconsented, unsolicited e-mail.

And the current SMTP setup definitely is a big part of the problem. Any solution has to impose an "honesty in e-mail" provision that makes untraceable e-mail subject to criminal sanction. Such a sanction would create a market for a better SMTP-type system that would allow e-mail to be traced.

This article is pie in the sky - taxing by itself causes more problems than it solves, but maybe the collective intelligence of Slashdot readers will provide some better, more promising ideas for solving this problem.

Re:Article is lacking Technological Saavy

[Minna Kirai]

It means that people will actually stop sending smaller email

More likely, they'd start sending really big Instant Messages.

And then, AIM's programmers would puff up it's features with things like "Buffer until recipient is online", to emulate the feel of old-fashioned email as much as possible, without actually meeting the legal definition and becoming taxable.

Re:Article is lacking Technological Saavy

[hesiod]

> More likely, they'd start sending really big Instant Messages

I think this is more insightful than you or the moderators realize. Email, for most purposes, is basically just a slow IM. If EMail were to be taxed, I bet you'd see a huge jump in corporate Instant Messaging agents.

Unfortunately, more UCE would eventually be sent that way, but at least there's time to get a heads-up on that before it is a huge problem.

Re:Article is lacking Technological Saavy

[Tokerat]

Yahoo Instant Messanger already does this.

Spammers

[rf0]

Spammers use a variety of tactics to hide themselves including using open proxies, forged email addresses, throw away domain + dialup accounts. The hardest thing I see is actually tying a spam into a particular group/person

Rus

Theoretically sound

[seldolivaw]

...but it would never happen.

1. How do free e-mail services work when mail costs money? A large group of the poorest users would decide to stick with the cheap, zero-cost mail, even if that meant they received lots of spam.
   
2. How do you manage the transition? Do people who have penny post refuse e-mail from people who don't? That would put a huge barrier up against upgrading: "hey, buy our e-mail product and you won't be able to receive e-mails from anybody but other people who've bought our product!"
   
3. How do you manage authenticity? Spammers are not the most scrupulous people; they already show no qualms about breaking the laws that exists against spam. Why would they pay attention to this one? Spammers would simply find some technological loophole or a security flaw and exploit it to send mass cheap e-mail anyway.
   

Spam is a natural result of an unregulated network. The reason the Internet is so interesting and creative is because it's unregulated. You have to take the rough with the smooth. Sure, get angry at the spammers, prosecute them even. But don't think about restricting freedoms just because it's convenient to do so: that's what DMCA is about, and the Patriot act, and all the dozens of other stupid "anti-terrorist" laws that countries around the world are implementing right now.

Give me freedom, or give me death. I'll take the spam.

Re:Theoretically sound

[Servo]

But don't think about restricting freedoms just because it's convenient to do so: that's what DMCA is about, and the Patriot act, and all the dozens of other stupid "anti-terrorist" laws that countries around the world are implementing right now.

So please tell me you're going to vote Libertarian next election? :)

Regarding 'taxation'

[grokBoy]

But, very soon, the Internet should turn into a penny post, with a levy of 1 cent per letter

What about us unfortunate not-for-profit types that run huge mailing lists? With reasonable traffic a list maintainer could be spending thousands of dollars per day.

Traditional 'penny post' is a unicast medium - each letter has only one recipient (unless a specific copy has been made by the sender.) A paper-based mailing list service would no doubt negotiate a special rate with the postal service to lower their costs - the exact opposite of the intended effect of this levy on spammers.

Altenate suggestion

[Max Romantschuk]

I doubt something like this could be incorporated into global legislation even if we had 10 years to do it. It's simply far to hard to maintain.

I think that a scheme where there would be a law on marking every email advertisement with something like [Advertisement] in the subject would be much more efficient. That is easier to track, and draws a clear line between obeying the law and not.

Using a system like this most people would filter out the spam, and the spammers would find their activities unprofitable. There would still be offenders, but surely it is cheaper to go after them compared to a global email taxation system?

This won't work.

[mrwonka]

The paper / production cost and postage dosn't stop those people who mail me flyers every week.

Why then would a $.01 email tax work ? Even at that cost it would still be the cheapest and most effecient way to advertise.

Maybe we should start taxing /. posts to cut down on the trolls.

Impossible to effectively implement

[Arethan]

This won't work for two reasons.
Open mail relays and forged message headers.

If you can't track the source, you can't bill them. So then who do you bill? The company with the open relay? Some would say that's a good way to promote good system administration, but remember that the bill imposed could easily put a company out of business and into bankruptcy. Sounds a little strong to me.

I still feel that we are better off not having a mandatory tax. Instead, set up third party message verification systems. Emailers can, for a fee, have their message ran through an intense one way hashing/encryption system to create a special "Registed Email" message header, which is then sent along with the original message to the intended recipient(s). Using this system is entirely optional, but read on for the benefits of using it at least once per recipient.

Upon reciept, the recieving email client will see the special header, check it's validity with the issuer, and place it in the user's inbox. If the message does not have the 'registed email' header, then the sender's name is checked against a list of known users. If the user is known (from having been manually entered or already recieved 1 registed email in the past, and not in the blocked senders list, the mail will again go into the users's inbox. All other mail is automatically placed in a folder of the user's choice. If that means the trash, fine.

There you go. Don't need to even care about open mail relays, because if you've never heard of them before, and they don't send registered email, you'll never see their penis enlarging message. I've thrown this idea out before, but I thought I'd see if I could get more feedback on it.

Re:Impossible to effectively implement

[swazi]

If the user is known (from having been manually entered or already recieved 1 registed email in the past, and not in the blocked senders list, the mail will again go into the users's inbox. All other mail is automatically placed in a folder of the user's choice. If that means the trash, fine.

There's a mob called Cloudmark who do basically the opposite with a product called SpamNet - known spams are sent to the trash, unknown spams are "fingerprinted" by a P2P kind of affair. No need to worry about registering, is usually quite effective and mostly transparent. The downside is that it's MS Outlook only and the free beta program has finished.

Works for me though, and beats a new tax...

Re:Impossible to effectively implement

[Anonymous Coward]

My first thought was "Oh God... you've just given Verisign an idea".
All kidding aside, when you give an organization like this that kind of power (and face it, only a couple of companies will come out alive), you've basically giving them permission to hold you hostage for your company's information. Ever have to deal with NetSol to get any information changed? How many hoops did they make you jump through? How long did it take?

Keep the Feds out!

[mabhatter654]

I've said it before that we need to keep the feds out of controlling email! They are horribly irresponsible right now. Taxes are not the way!

What AOL is doing IS the way. By seting a fairly decent criteria for restrictions then internally blocking the hell out of people. Granted, they could abuse it, but their customers wouldn't allow it to get out-of-hand, or go elsewhere; they're business people after all!

I still think there's a technical way to throttle spam. Maybe we need a "White" Hole List that good ISPs can sign, or tie into BIND to tie spammer domains to DNS. What needs to happen is that the Local ISPs need to take responsibility for what gets IN thru THEIR pipes! It would seem that things like DDOS and spam would have recognizable signatures on a network connection that ISPs could deal with. Much like the recent DNS missue, why the root servers are [should] only be accessable by ISPs; if they are, why are they still sending 90% junk to them. Same with spam! If you tied each email to a network-time-connection cost, then that would throttle spammers without hurting us normal users.

What ever happens DO NOT EXPECT THE GOVERNMENT TO MAKE IT BETTER. NEVER HAVE NEVER WILL!

How?

[Anonymous Coward]

So how exactly are you going to "meter" e-mail? Mass monitoring of port 25?

Even IF (and that's a big if) you manage to convince ISP's around the globe to buy into this taxation scheme, internet users will REVOLT.

What's to stop anyone from setting up an alternate mail system (say, Citadel/UX or even Fidonet!)? They can't meter that.

Why am I starting to think "Trystro" from Pynchon? Any attempt to tax email WILL end up creating a Trystro. Heck, maybe that's just what we need.

(reaching for muted bugle...)

Small inboxes at the cost of community?

[sonicsft]

For a momment lets put aside the cost and feasability of implementation. The internet is the most unregulated open space. People of all nations in the world can generally get access without being hampered by opressive firewalls(yes I am aware of China) and in the western world you can generally get on the net for free if you need to. Everyone can exchange ideas and communicate for free. Now suppose everyone had to chip in a penny every time they sent an email. Who pays for it? The ISP or the user? What about the user who participates in a dozen mailing lists, and communicates with friends? Why should that user have to pay for legitimate use of the internet? ISP prices will go up, and networks will close. Instead of being able to send mail to anyone anytime of the day you'll actually have to stop and think. It'll be like many Cellular providers with the unlimited on the same netowrk rates. People will group with one carrier inside online communities like AOL and possibly even opt-out of email service to avoid a fee increse. Regulation of email in my mind poses the threat of sending the net deeper into the dark ages of communication.

Good idea

[SonicTooth]

I think its a good idea, only problem is, how will you tax the spammers. Its easy enough to set up dedicated lines and such in smaller countries without restrictive goverments. It seems like true spam rebels would get around this.

But the greater the 5,000 a year is also a very good idea, i just feel bad for the various BDFL's of big open source projects.

GOOD IDEA??

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, this is a bad idea.
I live in Illinois, and the toll (just a tax per usage of roads) was only supposed to be temporary. But once the government realized it was a good money maker, and got a vested interest in it, it stayed forever. The government would think that $ .01/email would be great, but $.02 would be better, and $.03 and $.04 and pretty soon it's approaching u.s. post office prices. In fact the U.S. post office is a perfect example: I recall reading somewhere that the Post Office is making a pretty good profit, yet stamps keep going up in price.

Another serious issue is what government would collect the tax? Federal? State? Local? All three?
What about international email??

Not a box you want to open, touch or mail.

Re:GOOD IDEA??

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever seen the ITollway Palace out by Oakbrook Terrace? Plush, man, and it's empty. Mgt was embarrassed by it, so they left it empty and bought another building. Cool.

It costs the Tollway more to collect the tolls than revenue received. They have to borrow every penny for new construction.

The orginal bonds were retired in 1979, but the staff never did.

Gonna tax instant messaging too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like someone is missing something rather obvious. Tax email and then our IM will get blasted by spammers. The circle is endless. Where do you draw the line? Taxing doesn't solve a damn thing. Grab a clue.

interesting.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

Nice..... .01 cent, it is really nothing.

.02 cent, come on it is really nothing...and you already pay next to nothing.

.04 cent, we can really do some damage to those evil spamers.

.10 cent, you really need us to keep this going. Without it, the internet will turn back into child pron and a bunch of terror posts.

.32 cent, you don't use snail mail anymore and we invented the internet, and police it. It is only fair you buck up and pay for what you are using.

.50 cent, we can use the "internet tax" to pay for [insert pork belly here].

--> Extream, yes. Untrue, well do you really want to find out? Lets tax something you pay to use already. Lets tax something to solve a problem that should be addressed with the right kind of legislation. Lets tax, then pay the very people that are spamming us to find the other people that spam us. Better yet, lets give them special powers.... I really love the idea that a "tax" will fix the problem. It would be a tax on just the US to pay to controll something that is world wide and rest of the world and 99% of the US does not even want controlled.

"I have an idea, lets tax e-mail!!! - Bring it up now, then 3 years down the road make it happen. They will scream, piss, and moan now but when we bring it up again in 3 years it will not seem so extream because they heard it once already. Yea, don't forget to say it will kill spam, child porn, and Ben Ladin...."

Re:interesting.

[tallbloke]

It would be a tax on just the US to pay to controll something that is world wide

95% of the spam I get comes from the States.

But I agree, it's a dumb idea.

Freeze the spammers assets, and fine the companies which sell the products.

worst. idea. ever.

[esanbock]

(read in simpsosn comic book guy voice)

We do not need any more taxes!

[raal]

I believe that this is a really BAD idea. We already have taxes for about everything imaginable.

We do NOT need a tax on sending email. The ISP already has costs for bandwidth and as much as I hate to say spammers have to be buying bandwidth from someone.

Yes there are bandwidth costs on the recieving side as well but there are costs for both sides of phone calls as well and I still get a lot of telemarketers.

If they want to pass a useful law make it so folks have to have a VALID return address so I can filter the crap out!

Lets not create more taxes but simplify the ones we have. How many people actually do their own taxes? We need to simplify the tax code. Eliminate all the stupid add on taxes for services.

Support a Flat income tax or eliminate it with a simple sales tax.

You have got to be kidding me.

[Anonymous Coward]

#1 Who the hell is going to regulate that?
#2 What is stopping me from setting up my own server.
#3 Are they going to start FILTERING and WATCHING each email now so they can count them?

Tax on email? WHAT KIND OF CRACK ARE YOU SMOKING?!

The Only way to stop spam....

[dontod]

...is DDOS attacks against any open spam relay. Sure the poor sucker who has mis-configured their server won't be able to use it but with a gagillion pieces of spam flowing through it, it's not much use now.

Seriously, if it was organised well (and the legal ramifications sorted) it could work. DDOS a server until it has been configured properly.

Don
-----
OoOoh he card read good!

Hrmmm won't work

[matth]

This won't work. It works for the US Postal Service because there is a central location that everything goes through. This would be like the government trying to tax me when I carry an apple pie over to Aunt Jan who lives three doors down. I'm using my own private "network" (lawn) to get there.

Taxes have one prupose

[91degrees]

The only successful purpose of a tax is to generate revenue for governments. They do this quite effectively. When used to discourage certain types of behaviour, they simply aren't very effective. People will either pay the taxes, or find a way to avoid them.

Has anyone ever been put off drining, smoking or driving because of taxes? How about earning money? Owning a large house? Selling goods and services? All of these things are taxed. They have very little effect in reducing demand.

Re:Taxes have one prupose

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent point. This idea is completely ridiculous. So it is ONLY $10 year!? SO WHAT! I have enough taxes dammit and I am tired of being penny taxed to death. Taxing email is not going to stop spammers. They don't play by the rules. Why do we always forget that? Have you never heard of tax evasion?

Makes no sense

[samael]

Nearly all spam happens because people send email through unsecured servers. If the servers were secutre enough to be able to identify (and thus tax) the sender, there wouldn't be a spam problem in the first place!

Won't Help

[Anonymous Coward]

Most products advertised by spam are fraudulent anyway. I seriously doubt that this "Viagra" has ever seen a Pfizer factory.

What we need are stricter laws against fraud, especially health fraud, mortgage & loan swindles and Make Money Fast scams.

The catch.

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to tax all your emails, they must first know about all your emails. And if you hide your emails, that'll be illegal because it's avoiding paying your taxes.

Big brother is watching you closely...

This is the stupidest Idea *EVER*

[His name cannot be s]

Taxing email would stifle mailing lists massively.

I gave up on Usenet years ago, and use mailing lists as a method of communication that can be somewhat trusted to be spam free.

What possible benefit can no-money groups who use mailing lists get from this?

The money that people pay for their connection already goes to paying for bandwidth. Getting the greasy government fingers into it to further tax it, would be dumb dumb dumb. Who ever heard of taxes going away?... I can just imagine it, 50 years from now, I'll be telling my grandkids: "well sonny, I remember when it cost just a penny to send an e-mail... now it is 57 cents... *sigh*"...."Sure grampa... whatever"

Oh, and good fucking luck getting the entire world to collect the tax.

Re:Sig

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, like, the decimal jumped two spots to the left. Buggy code?

Gov't don't do tech

[pifalo]

The government should keep to what it's best at: protecting the commonwealth from harm.

Spam is an annoyance, but not a threat to my liberty! I'd rather pay a company $20 per year for their sotfware filtering service than pay the gov't even $5 a year for "preventing" spam. At least I know that the company will do more to protect me, because if they don't I'll go to their competitors! It's one of the few good qualities of capitalism.

What if the gov't does a bad job at preventing spam? Ever try to get money from the gov't when your car wheel gets mashed in an unfixed pothole?

Less gov't is good - let's them focus on the truly important aspects of individual freedoms. I'd rather the gov't tax my bread to prevent hunger than tax my e-mail to prevent spam.

-1 Troll

[26199]

Can anyone really take this seriously? It doesn't even begin to offer a solution to spam. Sounds like a troll to me.

Of course, if there was some magic way to implement such a tax, it might work. Odd how most of the solutions to spam rely on an impossible assumption becoming true...

Another way to tax spammers

[xigxag]

In the body of the spam there is usually contact information: a website or a toll-free phone number. Imagine that a large organized group of volunteers were to set up spam traps and identify the most egregious culprits. Then, if they would en masse simultaneously and repeatedly go to the spammer's web page or call the toll-free number, the spammer would be hit by a huge bill from his ISP or telco, and would also suffer a DoS preventing "legitimate" customers from signing up.

Snail Mail

[Col. Klink (retired)]

How is a penny a post going to eliminate spam. It would still be more than 2000% more expensive to send traditional junk mail, and I still get lots of that too.

Not to mention the fact that all of the mailing lists I subscribe to would shut down.

Wait - how the hell do they know who I am?

[Ieshan]

Isn't part of the point of email that it might want to be anonymous? Do you really want the government having records of each and every email you've sent so that they can collect taxes on it?

Old thinking that is going out of style

[banzai51]

First, I don't think this would ever work. Second, sending email is not free, I have to pay my ISP for the privilge. Third, where the hell does the government get off tring to con me into thinking they are providing me with some sort of service in this money grab? Pay per use is going the way of the dinosaur in communications. Look at MCI and Sprint offering one price per month for all calls. Pay one price and use it as much as you like. That is the way of the internet and the telephone/cellular business is moving to this model. The government has been salivating at the prospect of taxing the internet, especally email, for years now.

Right...and wrong.

[WoodSmoke]

IMHO, the only way a tax could work is if they provided an alternative, similar, value-added service to replace email that would have the tax. I think there are already companies who provide spam filtering for a charge, which would accomplish the same thing without introducing Big Brother fears. This is a waste of MY tax dollars and the time of MY employees, the US Government.

Just my 2 cents worth

WoodSmoke

First the Toe...

[Esion Modnar]

...then the whole foot, leg, and body of the TAX monster. Don't give it the chance.

Bet you don't know that the Federal income tax was once only supposed to affect the "wealthy." And was "voluntary."

Nuh-uh. Spam is bad, but it aint THAT bad.

Re:First the Toe...

[Quill_28]

I know that the poor didn't received government assistance also.

The were no medical programs, welfare, unemployment.

Author doesn't know what he's talking about

[arvindn]

What he proposes is the best way to kill e-mail. I can think of several problems right away:

• The spam problem currently exists mainly because we can't track down spammers. Until you solve that, implementing an e-mail tax will never get off the ground.
• What about open relays? Of course its stupid and irresponsible to have one, but now you could now find yourself being taxed thousands of dollars for doing so?
• What about an worm/trojan sending out bulk e-mail? Punishing the victim is a great idea.
• How do you deal with mail across national boundaries? I wonder if he has thought about the world about the USA.
• What about mailing lists? How do you propose to tax them? They take up more bandwidth than a single e-mail but less than n individual emails. Defining all these would lead to such a messy overregulated internet that it will lose all trace of what it was like formerly.

This guy has no idea of the technicalities of the internet.

Look at this statement:

The simplest way to regulate spam is through a tax. This requires smashing some myths. A decade ago, Americans were gulled by politicians of both parties into believing that taxing the internet exceeded the government's capability. When that proved to be manifestly untrue, they were told that a tax would be an affront to some mythic libertarian "spirit of the internet".

Mythic, eh? Has this troll heard of usenet? This is just an anti-libertarian rant/flame from some disgruntled control freak. Ignore it and move on.

Re:Author doesn't know what he's talking about

[aengblom]

This is just an anti-libertarian rant/flame from some disgruntled control freak. Ignore it and move on.


You should know that this is Lawrence Lessig of Eldred v. Ashcroft fame (challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act). He's not some nut-job that should just be dismissed. This doesn't mean his ideas are good or should be used, but I'll give you 10-to-1 that he has answers to your questions. They may not satisfy you, but I don't think it's very safe to assume that a Stanford Law professor, with significant experience arguing before the Supreme Court can't handle your questions.

Re:Author doesn't know what he's talking about

[Anonymous Coward]

And now we get to it. He's a "troll" because he doesn't appear to agree with YOUR politics.

You gave plenty of good, practical reasons not to impose a tax on e-mail. Why bring flimsy idealogical disagreements and ad hominem attacks into it? You lower yourself to his level with your own anti-anti-libertarian rant/flame. Lower, actually, since he did not say anything that could reasonably be characterized as anti-libertarian; he merely stated his belief that libertarianism does not represent the "spirit of the internet." That could just as easily be taken as a criticism of the internet, although I believe he was just making an observation.

Re:Author doesn't know what he's talking about

[chundo]

Who does the email reporting? A single email will inevitably be routed through several mailservers. Are all of them responsible for reporting the email? And how is it personally identifiable for tax purposes (and if it is, what does this mean for privacy concerns)? Or, if the cost is to go to the ISP for bandwidth/infrastructure improvements, who gets the penny? The first relay? The last? Split evenly? How do relays avoid charging each other for the service of forwarding an email?

This is laughable - not even worth a discussion. When also taking into account all the additional valid reasons listed above, there is no possible way any perceived "benefit" to consumers could ever outweigh the very slight hindrance it would provide to spammers.

-j

Re:Author doesn't know what he's talking about

[arvindn]

Hehe, we are talking at cross-purposes. Of course I know and respect Lessig. But the guy that I'm talking about is the author of the first link in the story, who critisizes Lessig's proposal, which is the second link.

Yes, let's add _more_ laws we won't enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

Fraud, like tax evasion, is a crime. But this doesn't stop all those Nigerian Bank scammers now does it? Our problem is not law, but rather the will to enforce it. As if an email tax will somehow make these criminals turn clean, and the ones who don't easier to find. Now I get to pay twice.

I won't help

[RosCabezas]

I have a smll company that sells email services. I probably wouldn't be able to cope with the intrincacies of a world wide payment system and afford the changes.
Anyway, it would be quite difficult to work that kind of system. Probably only way would be like passport.
I don't like it.

email taxation

[rodney dill]

This might be a workable idea until the the geniuses in Washington get their hands on it and provide their own "value-adds". Remember this is the same group the provides for private citizens to send snail mail at 37 cents a pop, but bulk mailers get a reduced rate.

Just remember which of these two groups will have lobbyists representing them when these decisions are made.

Other than the evil of the bureaucrats altering the idea beyond recognition (FUBAR again), the idea has its merits.

Re:email taxation

[mark_lybarger]

um, bulkmailers get discount rate because it doesn't take as much to process the mail. they have to conform to rigid postal standards to be eligible for bulk mail. (size, addressing, etc). they're all presorted and that for the post office.

no difference than getting a bulk rate on any other product.

Re:email taxation

[rodney dill]

I pretty much agree with your statement, but I also think bulk mailers get good rates because that means a steady stream of income to, in that case the government. With email it will mean a steady stream on income to the government too, either directly or through taxes. As long as money is involved there is the potential that the heavy hitters will get preferential treatment. In the case of email, this could mean spammers as well as many well meaning advertisers.

Might be a Good Idea

[Greyfox]

Since the mass migration off SMTP would finally allow for the overhaul of the protocol that is what is really needed to eliminate spam. Perhaps instead of attempting to implement an unenforcable tax on a single internet protocol, we should carve into stone the elimination of encription export regulations. Once we can write identity authenticating SMTP clients and servers without fear that we'll be taken away the minute we post the code on the internet, I'm sure that will begin to happen.

All the E-Mail clients I've run across makes you jump through hoops to enable encryption because of those regulations, and the atmosphere of paranoia surrounding them is still very much there.

How are they gonna bill this?

[sabri]

I really wonder how they think this is going to be implemented technically. First, you need to know who is sending which email to which recipient. Then you need to know who to bill for it.

So far the easy part. Next you need to know for sure that it's not relayed through an open relay, open proxy or otherwise compromised system.

Next, I will promise you e-mail-tourism. If the US implements this and Europe doesn't, I can tell you where most of the mail is coming from in ten years (Asia? ;-).

Is the IETF already working on SMTP-NEXTGEN? Nah, I think this is just a waste of time.

We already pay internet tax.

[Anonymous Coward]

The bandwidth, and the access rights I pay to my ISP are already taxed, last time I checked here in the UK thats 17.5%.

Me thinks FT.com are hoping for a slashdot effect to drive up advertising revenue, god knows they need it.

What we need is a new protocol

[Anonymous Coward]

SMTP has come a long way, but we need a revamp. We need a way to officially and legally blacklist some sites or IP addresses. We need a way to authenticate servers and an automated clearing house for spam complaints. Enough of sending e-mail to ISPs and never getting an answer.

Also, we can pretty much limit the number of messages any server receives from any one IP address that's not associated to a legitimate business. Hotmail just did something like this. I don't see why RoadRunner or Earthlink can't do the same.

It's also time to undefine "open relay" for commercial e-mail software. It should require at least three different and obscure configuration parameters, something a newbie wouldn't be able to set by mistake.

another poorly thought out proposal

[Thorizdin]

I guess with presidential politics already starting it was inevitable that people would start putting forward ideas to combat spam in the political arena. My first question on this is why would I pay the government anything to send email, since neither state nor federal agencies have anything to do how I process email. They don't provide bandwidth, servers, or even oversight. The author's suggestion that this money could be used to "The proceeds could go to maintain and expand bandwidth." is patently ridiculous since the government doesn't provide bandwidth, private companies do. The next issue is just how would you even implment this? Most of the spam that our servers process comes from places that US can't tax, and I imagine that if this was implemented, then the remaining spam would quickly move to places that aren't known for cooperating with US courts & extradition. There is a reason that Sharman Networks (the folks who own Kazaa) are incorporated
in Vanuatu
The only thing that we can do that isn't a band aid or a un-enforcable law is look at how to rewrite the SMTP protocol, right now it is far too easy (by design) to send email from anywhere to anywhere without any accountability. We need a system that allows for servers to positively identified (something similar to a secure cert, not that I want to hand more money to Verisign but...) Then its up to the individual admin to decide what to do with email from a un-certified server; accept it, rate limit it, tag it, or deny it. Now no one _wants_ to rewrite all of the MTA's in the world, but at least this gives a way for non-compliant servers to get mail processed until everyone has gotten their's updated.

Go for it!

[CrazyJim0]

Then when I have to pay $10,000 a year in emails, but I'm only sending out newsgroup emailings, party invitations, and PSA forwarding... And I have 0$ because no one wants to give a CMU grad an interview. Then I can say,"Hey brother, can you spare a dime."

Er, obvious flaws

[Kraegar]

tax could be made progressive by exempting, say, those who sent fewer than 5,000 letters a year.

Ok, so bigger_penis_now@hotmail.com sends 4999 emails. bigger_peenis_now@hotmail.com sends 4999 emails. get_big_penis_now@spammer.com sends 4999 emails. On the other hand, valid list-serves get billed because they need a consistent address to do their business. Spammers are (obviously) well known for forging the headers on their emails, the from info, etc. So who do you bill? how do you track it down? who are you paying to track it down?

Okay-- so what is "email", then?

[adjuster]

My largest fear from this type of proposal comes from the potentially vague definition of "email" that might be created. What is email, exactly? Are we talking about only SMTP? If so, what about "Instant Messenger" spam? Maybe we should classify instant message protocols as email, too. What about USENET? Should we classify NNTP as email, as well? What about SMS spam? What about the "next big thing", whatever it turns out to be? Perhaps we should have taxes based on IP packets sen1! That would be about as sane... yeesh!

Think I'm making this up? I had one customer who was ranting to me about their LAN-based "email" not working (a year ago, mind you). Upon closer inspection, I found their "email system" to be "WinPopUp" running on each PC that they'd use to send pop-up messages to each other. That was their "email". Think of your own relationships-- you know at least one person who calls instant messenger systems "email" (much like those novices who confuse RAM and hard disk space and call them both "memory").

The Internet works because we all agree to abide by the same standards, and agree that ICANN is the authority for naming / numbering. This spirit of cooperation works because we all benefit-- not because some government legislated it so. If some idiotic "email tax" does get legislated in the U.S., we run the risk of making ourselves into "second class" Internet citizens, and creating the "United States Internet" and the "rest of the world's Internet".

Spam is a social problem being "enabled" by technology. It cannot be legislated away, because it breeds on human nature: the desire to have large returns from little work. Real answers are things like ubiquitous public-key infrastructure, signed email, reputation "credits" (or "karma", if you like), and accountability. The decentralized "web of trust" model of PGP combined with the "reputation credit" model of eBay is what I'm talking about. Imagine an email client program that categorizes incoming mail based on the "cred" accumulated by the sender in a decentralized, non-government controlled "reputation tracking" system.

Taxes and laws aren't going to solve the problem. They're going to stifle the real power the Internet has-- bringing people together and enhancing communication. Worse-- they risk making an "island" of any country who would enact such idiotic legislation.

Re:Okay-- so what is "email", then?

[Minna Kirai]

(much like those novices who confuse RAM and hard disk space and call them both "memory")

What about those experts who know that a hard disk is technically one kind of RAM, and call them both memory?

(The best terms would be [magnetic|electronic] storage)

Re:Okay-- so what is "email", then?

[Saeger]

The decentralized "web of trust" model of PGP combined with the "reputation credit" model of eBay is what I'm talking about.

Yeah, lots of people are "talking about" it, but, "when all is said and done, more is said than done." :)

I agree though that decentralized trust & reputation and other systems have the potential to be a killer plugin (not an app) in the near future. The downside is that business and government aren't so keen on distributed systems because their power depends on centralized command & control hierarchies, so they don't have much incentive to get behind it.

--

Taxation without Repeesentation

[linuxislandsucks]

Most ISPs are goign to refuse to be tax collectors without any extra money to cover theri efforts..they dont want the freakign hedache

Not to mention that most World citizens pay too much in taxes without beign able to vote on them in the first place.. we dont need more!

Fsck the Govt!

[Anonymous Coward]

After done with taxing the living and the dead, the Govt. wants more money to spend on toilet seats costing $210 apiece !!!! Why the hell don;t they tax us for walking instead of driving (Bush hear this!), why don;t they tax us everytime we use the Loo, and why don;t they tax the politicians everytime they think ($0.00 revenue) ??? Email ought to be free and WILL always be! To shoot all citizens because some of them are murder-convicts and rapists smacks of communism.

No! No! NON!

[mcwop]

It will start at a penny, but then expand as all taxes/levies/fees tend to. Have you looked at your phone or cable bill? Some idiot politician will come along and say that the spam tax needs to expand to 5 cents to feed the widows and orphans.

I hate spam as much as the next person, but unless these fees/taxes will only be paid by spammers then I am against it.

It's just another money grab

[Anonymous Coward]

Who get's the money?The government?jesus h. christ,the next thing will be a tax on wiping your ass, 1 penny per wipe, they will enforce this by installing webcams in toilets and having the likes of jerry falwell, pat buchannan, and pat robertson monitoring them.EPA will fine us for
excess methane gas releases,etc.Texas is already considering to include riding lawnmowers as motor vehicles, under the same laws as cars and trucks, to be registered and inspected.When the berlin wall came down, i knew the commies have one, look around you people.

How retarded

[A non moose cow]

Every problem that we have that revolves around a man-made technology is fixable with a man made technology. We don't need taxes, we need to fix the core of the email system.

"The simplest way to regulate spam is through a tax."

Perhaps this is true, but the simplest way is almost NEVER the best way. How are you going to define the differences between email and every other electronic message passing? Will the tax suddenly apply to IM's? then web pages? then internet phone calls? What happens 20 years from now when the technology is different? Will the tax stop? Hell no! Most likeley there will be a new tax code buried in every little packet so that the government can get even more money for nothing.

Why should the burden of the "fix" for this problem be shouldered mostly by the people that it is trying to "protect"? I don't want to pay my government for the privelage of doing something that was previously free. That does not solve anything! I want the people sending spam to pay ME!

This tax might sound innocent on its surface, but it only takes one little thing like this to make it seem acceptable to throw a tax on every digital transaction.

To all you dopes that think this is a good idea, think about the big picture. This point in time is not static. Technology is changing constantly. Spam will die when the time is right. For now we can just deal with it with the methods available to us. Do not let the government see the Internet as the latest frontier where they can profit by "saving us from ourselves".

Re:How retarded

[runderwo]

Perhaps this is true, but the simplest way is almost NEVER the best way.

Wait, you mean even good old Occam's Razor has been inverted now? This world moves too fast for me nowaways.

Re:How retarded

[A non moose cow]

Absolutely. The problem with the Occams Razor idea is that it presumes an equal level of knowledge by all parties. It does not address the differences of perspective between people who are knowledgable about a topic and those that are not.

This email case is a perfect example. Christopher Caldwell does not know anything about email except that he can use it to communicate with people. The actual process of what goes on behind the scenes has been abstracted to a simple series of clicks and windows with a lot of verbiage that parallels it to a postal mail system. He has a simplistic view to start with, so applying the principle of "The simplest model is the best" results in a horrific complicated mess when it goes to the implementation stage.

Reading it now, I should have tried to explain my point more thoroughly. The reason that the simplest way is almost never the best way is that the simplest way most often comes from people who do not see the whole picture.

This is the worst idea yet...

[Friendly]

Has any one stopped to think how one would enforce this tax? The only plausible way is to have ALL email go through government owned servers. Just think every email is not only taxed, but also scanned by the FBI, NSA and CIA before it goes to the correct address. How do we stop the flow of un-taxed email then, do we block port 25 on every network and force every company and every user to change to a taxable email form. What about pop up adds and chat and IRC and AIM and any other type of communications device? Are we going to tax every one of those? What I want to know is why this spam thing is such a problem. I have three email accounts - two free and one corporate, I get less the 20 spam messages a month. Why, because I do not give my email address away to every web page out there and I do not sign up for free p0rn passwords. Come on people this is a technological and social issue, not a government tax issue. People need to change the way they distribute their email address. I bet half the people who get spam have downloaded Webshots, Kazza, the American Flag desktop animation, or send tons of e-cards. STOP GIVING OUT YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS TO SITES! If a site asks for your email address - read their privacy statement and then if you do not realy have to put in a real address, make one up. Do not be a dumb ass and give your friend's or enemy's addresses out. Give them spam@is/forsucks.local. This email address is going nowhere.

Here is the solution to spam. Require every email sever to have a digital signature. Then sent up your email server to receive email from server with a valid and current signature. Also then set up the email servers to only send messages from authenticated local users. This will stop spamers from faking addresses. Then we need to crack down on free email accounts. Come on what incentive is there for Hotmail and Yahoo to crack down on users if no one is paying? Either make them pay for the service or put limits on the numbers of out going emails per hour, per day and per month. Disable mailing distribution lists on these sites.

A final thought about taxation. Say by some disastrous turn of events there is a tax on emails... Where is the tax money going to go? Certainly not to maintaining the Internet. It will go to highways and military defense if we are lucky. Most likely it will go to tax cuts for the rich.

We need to come up with a solution that is technological in nature, keep the government away from my emails.

Friendly

Re:This is the worst idea yet...

[MikeVx]

Here is the solution to spam. Require every email sever to have a digital signature.

Almost, but not quite. A good solution is something that badly needs to be done anyway. The concept of the clear-text connection needs very badly to go away. All net connections should be encrypted at the end points.

As a start, all e-mail should be encrypted with public-key systems. You can publish your public key with your e-mail address using some agreed-upon format. The point of this is taking an idea from HashCash (link up the page a ways) of imposing a cost in CPU cycles for sending a message. Except for very large mailing lists, such overhead would be minimal for individuals, even on ancient computers, but the volumes of a spammer would make for a crushing cpu load. I can spare a few seconds to encrypt mail I send, I can easily spare a few seconds per message for decryption of mail I get. Even if I send dozens of messages a day, the overhead for anything but a file attachment would be almost unnoticeable. Until some end-to-end encrypted replacement for mail transfer agents becomes available, this could be routed through the existing infrastructure by using new mail clients.

Large mailing lists would have a problem, but even the largest of legitimate lists is dwarfed by even small-time spammers for volume, so I think something like this is the way to go.

The one critical pont is that the encryption used would have to be free, in both senses, to allow for porting to old or scarce systems. This also adds benefits about people nosing about for e-mail contents when they shouldn't be.

Worst idea

[Spazmania]

the Internet should turn into a penny post, with a levy of 1 cent per letter.

This is quite possibly the worst idea I've ever heard. The vast majority of email system owners out there havn't the ability to assess such a thing, let alone bill for it.

Besides, the legislative portion of the answer is simpler.

The stick: A significant fine for hosting spammers with a DMCA-like safe-harbor clause which allows the service provider hosting the spammer's connection to avoid liability if they cut the spammer promptly upon notification and provide records upon subpoena. This does more than just penalize ISPs who persist in hosting spammers; it gives them the legal escape clause they need from their stupid contracts.

The carrot: a civil penalty of a few dollars per message, collectible by *all* network providers through which the spam travels. The networks near the destination don't receive enough spam from specific individuals to make it worthwhile to sue, but the networks close to the sources do.

In this structure, taking the spammers for all they're worth would simply be good business. That would make it relatively effective at eliminating stateside sources of spam. And you get a measure of control against non-US spam through blocking of spam havens at the network borders compelled by part 1.

What about Spam from Hong Kong?

[Esion Modnar]

...and other international places. We gonna tax them too?

We export our corporate influence, our DMCA-clone laws, and now our taxes too? It would be hard to deny the existence of the American Imperium.

Seems that too often we treat problems with international scope, as if they were only national.

Just like stamps!

[poopyhead]

Yeah, this would cut down on spam in much the same way that having stamps has drastically reduced the amount of junkmail that shows up at my home every day..

Right.

And what about all those innocent email lists, etc that are out there on a subscription basis? Would those be taxed as well? Because that would cut down on ALL email, not just the SPAM. And face it, email IS pretty much the killer app of the Internet, even though the web is what gets all the attention.

The Liberal Idea for fixing anything

[Sergeant Beavis]

If it smokes, Tax it.
If it drives, Tax it.
If it drinks, Tax it.
If it spams, Tax it.
If it dies, TAX IT!

Whoa, Camel!

[ahamos]

And how many spam messages do you get that seem to come from yourself? And what about those who steal AOL-account passwords (we may not like AOL, but all of our grandmothers do)? How will the FTC differentiate between e-mail that has been forged or spoofed and "honest" spam? I certainly don't want to get a bill at the end of the year for $2.5M because someone spent way too much time trying to guess my Yahoo password. What recourse would be available? How do I *prove* that I am not the spammer who offered to enlarge your penis safely and naturally? Will defendants be required to offer up their hard-drives for forensic investigation? This quickly becomes a YRO issue.

Mannnn...

[TheSHAD0W]

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a politician, everything looks like a cash cow.

Has anyone here thought through what would happen if we all allowed politicians to tax email? First off, the money would not (as suggested) be used to pay for bandwidth and routing, it would be thrown into the general fund like most other taxes. If it WERE used to enhance bandwidth and routing, it would be done in the same way government does all of its programs; inefficiently. They would then claim to not be getting enough revenue to perform the task, and raise this "tax" higher. Much higher.

A program like this one might have one beneficial effect; it'd probably stimulate the genesis of a new, spam-resistant (but untaxed) email system. That would certainly be nice. Thing is, once this new system became established, the government would step in, say "this is email too", and tax the hell out of it as well.

they got it all wrong

[Neophytus]

all we need is the evil bit!

This is why going after fraud makes more sense

[swb]

Spam control has spent too much time focusing on how to get rid of people who send bulk email.

This is an issue because it leads to ridiculous proposals like taxing email. I won't even start on how naive to assume you can implement a new tax that stays at its rate and actually goes towards a dedicated purpose.

While the bulker mailers are responsible for the SMTP transaction, they're seldom behind the penis enlargers, the stock scams, the mortgage scams and the other fraudulent activity in almost all spam messages which is the real CAUSE of spam.

If we could just get the government(s) (local, state, federal) to focus their powers on following the money trail and jailing people committing fraud we'd make a big dent in spam, especially if many of the big bulk emailers were indicted as co-conspirators.

It's right to complain about spam, but without focusing on the root causes of it we risk monumentally stupid ideas like taxes, licensing and so on which won't solve anything and will only complicate the internet for ordinary people.

Just like any buisness....

[shamrock_shake1]

The cost will trickle down to the consumer. Say Dell figures that to process your order will take an average of 5 emails. They'll just add the cost to your order. What's 5 cents to the end consumer? If they cared they'd cash in their soda cans.

Spammers, since this is who this'll intend to deter, will also figure it as a cost of doing buisness. Say the average spammer sends out 2000 penile enlargement emails, it'll cost him $20. Out of that 2000, say 30 bite the bait and buy the sugar pills. The spammer just made a huge profit, and that 20 bucks is chump change.

The only benefit would be the telco's, who apparently will be routing the money away from the purpose of broadband to make a commercial trying to get yuppies to download the latest Pop sond in a ringtone.

Yet again yuppies benefit, geeks suffer.

Not a one country problem

[unoengborg]

E-mail is an international thing. Spam problems can't be solved just by having one ore even many countries introducing a tax. There will always be some country where the taxes are low or nonexistent. And we can expect that spammers would move their operation to such countries.

We can also expect that companies that need to communicate internally by sending short mail messages will extend their virtual private network into such low tax regions.

The only thing that happens would probably be less incomes to ISPs in countries having this tax.

Won't/can't pay the tax? OK, road gang for you.

[minas-beede]

If $0.01/email is too expensive for you (I won't argue) then instead of paying the tax you can work on the "road gang" cleaning up email. What you are assigned to do is to detect any attempt made to see if your own system can be used to send spam and to report that. If you have a "software firewall" this means you report attempts to use your ports 25, 1080,3128, 8070, 8080, etc.

If you want to go further you can run software that does more than detect such attempts - it traps them. For port 25 (SMTP) there's (as an example) Jackpot: jackpot.uk.net. If you run Unix or Linux then you can configure sendmail to not deliver and trap everything sent to you. If you want to run an MTA then you can secure it and check your logs every day or so for illicit activity. The point is to stop ignoring this form of spammer abuse and start acting on it, to the point that they are forced to give it up.

Get a decent number of "road gang" workers and the need for the tax melts away. Huh - how about that...

This problem with taxes is...

[gUmbi]

This problem with taxes is that they always go up.

Jason.

Unintended consequence regarding computer security

[Shoten]

I subscribe to various lists that cover computer security. Some of them are well-established, and (should there be a rule for certain email uses to be exempt) would have little trouble attaining an exemption from the tax. However, other lists that spring up from time to time to address new technologies would have a much harder time, and would be quashed entirely by such a tax. When I think about lists that have come up with regards to wi-fi security, VPNs, and other such things, I can only imagine what lists would not come to be, or would only come to be with the support of wealthy vendors to bankroll them.

RE: YOUCH!!!

[fshalor]

As someone who legitimatily and necessarily sends over 100 emails a week, and most of these are directly related to my employment and related actvities, this is disturbing. Who gets the money though? The people whos hardware is "used" or the G-man.
I guess either way it wouldn't matter much, since both would have the same hypothetical effect on spammers.
I'm sure this would be a logistics nightmare on university campusii where mail servers are not eentirely centeralized. And there would be a whole new string of loopholes related to spoofing, and accounts with "bulk sending rates" and such.

My bet would be that intranet mail on campus networks would probably still be free to send for a long time after such a change in the books.

Still, this is like slashing away at the core benifit of the net. I feel it sharply, having started my networking experience in a Freenet Helpdesk office many years ago. Mostly helping people send free email through a free account.

Enough about SPAM

[joshv]

The constant media fascination with SPAM is getting to be more annoying than spam itself. I can't read an online journal or newspaper without seeing at least one article about spam. These articles are a new form of spam unto themselves.

-josh

Barking up the wrong tree

[broothal]

This is such a bad idea I don't know where to start.

1) It will kill most mailinglists

2) It requires me to pay to get rid of something I never asked for (spam)

3) It will kill a lot of clueless admins. Sure, I've often toyed with the idea of killing those who runs an open relay, but imagine getting a bill for $10000000 because a spammer abused your open relay. Nowadays, most people will close the relay once someone tells them about it and get on with their life. In the future, they'll be broke.

4) It will require wast amounts of ressources to collect the fee and maintain accounts of all internet users. This will, in turn, make internet access more expensive for the end user. After all, someone has to pay fo all the logistics, and that someone is you and me.

/christian

This is interesting...

[psyco484]

But as others have pointed out, it harms free services, mailing lists, etc. Not to mention that it's hard as hell to track spammers already, they do a decent job of covering their tracks, I have a feeling if they didn't some crazy would send them a bomb in the mail. Aside from that, what do you consider as a person when determining the tax. Is it per email account? If so, spammers could get around that really easily, and many people I know have more than two email addresses. Is it through an individual ISP? I hope not, that elminates free services, or sends them all the spam, stressing the free services' servers. It would also mean college students (myself included) would probably see a hike, even if it's small, in tuition to cover the email tax. Even then, what's to prevent someone on a fast college network from sending bulk mailings from their dorm? Does this mean we'll need to give our social security number when signing up for an email account? Is this yet another bad idea? I certainly think so.

Destroy the global village to save it, eh?

[ianscot]

Looks like the spammers are winning their guerrilla war, then. We're suggesting responding with disproportionate force in a way that puts the main burden on noncombatants -- always the sign you're about to lose something like this.

I mean, we'd be throwing a huge burden on a system that basically works in order to go after abusers who've already shown they're not going to give up in an arms race for their survival. Good thinking. It's not like spammers would try to, say, abuse other people's servers to send messages without an attributable (read: taxable) source on them. No way. They wouldn't think of that one, no precedent for that... Or were we creating a big new policing division of the U.S. Postal service to defend e-mail servers?

Seriously, how wrongheaded is this? Extremely. It'd be impossible to administer and track without seriously degrading the flexibility and increasing the cost of e-mail systems we have right now on the cheap. How many times has your address changed? Who's tracking your tax bill across all those? Etc. etc. etc. Classic blindered thinking -- a pet idea we should pat on the head and move past. (Exactly how does this tax get collected across borders? Person hasn't addressed the international nature of the internet. Person suggests a "progressive" version, flying in the face of 20-some years of U.S. taxation trends. And so on.)

Re:Destroy the global village to save it, eh?

[Reziac]

In fact, I think a side effect of such a tax would be that all unnecessary personal and mailing list email would dry up -- and all that'd be left is spam from overseas.

In short, it would make the problem worse, not better.

Create a new medium, don't try to fix the old on

[Sherloqq]

IMHO, a better idea, compared to imposing taxes on email, would be to create a new infrastructure for exchanging of "email", where things like forged headers, open relays and spammers would be a thing of the past. What I'm thinking of is essentially a new TCP port, a new service, a new daemon, designed from scratch, one that takes all the concerns of today, does some forecasting for the future, and makes us forget about spam for a few years. Something that uses certificates from a few select (trusted) authorities to verify connecting server's identity (kinda like caller-ID, you only answer the calls you want to allow) -- SSL is an accepted way for us to verify the identity of the website we're trying to connect to, why couldn't it be a way to verify the identity of the server trying to connect to us? And throw in some encryption into the mix so that the traffic can't be \easily\ snooped. Rogue servers would quickly get their act together if they started to have mail queue up because their certs were expired / bad etc.

I think that trying to get an old medium to conform to today's demands might be more expensive (taxes or no taxes) than to simply coming up with a new one. A well-designed (and I don't claim to have one) solution would take less time to implement and I think would be easier to manage.

I understand that SSL, encryption and such would not be music to Dept. of Homeland Security's ears, that they would much rather leave the burden and cost on us, but there would be some upsides from their vantage point, too -- there would be less traffic for them to sift through (though it would be more intensive to process it), and I'm sure they'd get their back-door tentacles into the architecture somehow.

I won't even get into arguments like "how do you tax someone who's out of your jurisdiction", or "how do you get thousands of sysadmins try to add SSL to sendmail/qmail/pick-your-MTA without breaking backward-compatibility" etc. Just like gopher and ftp have/are becoming things of the past, I think SMTP should too.

Stupid

[kalidasa]

Unenforceable. How do you track down the sender to collect the tax? How do you prevent non-tax-paying email senders from sending? What's to prevent a "free" internet from developing and eventually being overcome with spam?

No sir, I don't like it...

[Alphi1]

I don't like this idea one bit, for a variety of reasons (yes, some are repeats of what's already been posted, I just felt like consolidating): 1) Free mailing lists (of which I'm on a few), which have already been mentioned 2) This won't affect non-U.S. spammers 3) It'd be tough to tax a spammer you cannot even find, and we cannot seem to track down spammers today! 4) Sending e-mails from work (especially personal ones) - generally most employers look the other way with regards to sending personal e-mails (and I use that to keep in touch with friends, or even make plans with them). If the company is suddenly paying money per e-mail, you can be sure that looking the other way is a practice that will stop, and quickly.

"Tax" sender certs

[putaro]

I've been thinking along similar lines, but rather than taxing each e-mail sent, set up an open, low-cost certificate registry. Certs could cost $1 apiece or perhaps free, subsidized by commercial mailers. In order to get a cert you have to have the usual verifiable stuff. have commercial e-mailer certs available for, say, $100, plus they are marked as commercial mailers.
Then, only accept e-mail that's been signed properly. Anyone abusing a personal certificate gets blacklisted. If you don't want commercial e-mail, chuck anything signed by a commercial cert.

Manifestly untrue.

[rjh]

Spammers just can't afford to sign their mails - with any signature.

Spam is one email being sent out a million times. Identical copies of messages flood a network. (If you don't believe this, I'll show you a spam I recently received which had over a thousand entries in the CC field. The spammer accidentally CCd instead of BCCd.)

If you're sending a million copies of one message, you only need one PGP signature. It becomes a fixed one-time fee per different email you send out, not a per-message CPU tax.

Re:Manifestly untrue.

[hammy]

You could make the PGP signature incorporate the recipient's address as part of the digest. Then a new digest would be unique for every recipient and it would no longer be a "fixed one-time fee".

Re:Manifestly untrue.

[rjh]

Great. Now you're advocating changing an IETF RFC away from its original intended purpose (protecting data in transit) and towards a specific purpose (making it a CPU tax) by the introduction of new MUSTs which serve absolutely no useful purpose towards its original task?

Think about it for five minutes. You'll come up with half-a-dozen methods which don't involve subverting an IETF standard.
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Free hint: require a mailer field, X-SHA1-Hash, which is a 20-byte hash of (a) the message, (b) the timestamp, (c) the sender, (d) the original mailserver, and (e) the receiver. Anything which doesn't have an accurate X-SHA1-Hash gets discarded at the destination MTA. Presto. You achieve your CPU tax, but you don't subvert an IETF standard in order to do it.

I leave finding all the flaws in the above idea as an exercise for the reader.

Re:Manifestly untrue.

[epgandalf]

I saw an article on this subject in MIT Technology Review a couple of months ago. What we need is to make senders solve an NP-hard problem that involved the sending email address, recipient email address, date, subject, and message body. Target the problem so that it takes about 10 seconds on a modern computer. Because the problem is in NP, it can be checked quickly. This computing cost will prevent spammes from sending out millions of emails. If you are on a mailing list, you could specify that you accept unsigned emails from a certain address.

Re:Manifestly untrue.

[theLOUDroom]

Spam is one email being sent out a million times. Identical copies of messages flood a network. (If you don't believe this, I'll show you a spam I recently received which had over a thousand entries in the CC field.

Only the stupidest spammers send out 1,000 of th same message. Ever get a spam the had some seemingly random characters in the subject line? Here's why.....

Say you're bigISP. You want to stop spammers. Some cable modem sends 10,000 identical messages to you (or CC'ed or Bcc'ed to 10,000). Hello, spam alert! Blackhole/bounce all the messages. 10,000 spam emails blocked.

The fact that you got a message with 1,000 entries in the CC field, shows that your ISP does basically no spam filtering at all. If all spam was really do this way, we would have a spam problem. It would be trivial to block it.

Re:Manifestly untrue.

[theLOUDroom]

Free hint: require a mailer field, X-SHA1-Hash, which is a 20-byte hash of (a) the message, (b) the timestamp, (c) the sender, (d) the original mailserver, and (e) the receiver. Anything which doesn't have an accurate X-SHA1-Hash gets discarded at the destination MTA. Presto. You achieve your CPU tax, but you don't subvert an IETF standard in order to do it. I leave finding all the flaws in the above idea as an exercise for the reader.

This is a very good idea! The only major flaw I see is for large mailing lists, any ideas on how to solve it?

Damn. Extra flaw. The MTA has to compute the hash too. Still, I wonder if this idea is salvageable. Maybe auto blacklist severs who retransmit X invalid messages for Y hours. This would make it harder to exploit your idea for a DOS attack.

Ah...idea on the malinglist problem. Create a BULK:yes/no field. For bulk mail the SHA1 does not use the TO: field. The end user could then maintain a whitelist of bulk email lists he's signed up for.

Any other flaws I'm missing?

Re:Manifestly untrue.

[Fzz]

Damn. Extra flaw. The MTA has to compute the hash too.

SHA is pretty cheap. But it doesn't have to be SHA. There are a whole class of assymetric algorithms that are far harder to generate than to check.

A simple example: generate the SHA hash of the msg, to, from timestamp and payload as before. Call this H1. Now the sender is required to find a 80-byte string whose SHA hash has the same first n bits as H2. This is arbitrarily hard for the sender (choose an appropriate value of n), and constant cost for the receiver.

Now if SHA is too hard (I don't think it is), you can can choose a cheaper hash, and still make it hard for the sender.

Re:Manifestly untrue.

[rthille]

Read up on 'hashcash', basically, you combine a whitelist setup with the hash-cash setup so that unsolicited emails can still get through, if they have the hash based 'postage'. Mailing lists get through because they are on your whitelist.

Of course, there are things like TMDA which is a whitelist managing MDA that sends confirmation emails back to the sender if the aren't on the whitelist. This is generally enough to stop spam.

Re:Manifestly untrue.

[rjh]

Ever get a spam the had some seemingly random characters in the subject line?

Where do you get the idea PGP incorporates the subject line into a signature? It doesn't. Only the message body is incorporated, and the message body remains constant across a huge number of emails.

The entire subject-line-alteration is a giant non sequitur.

Re:Manifestly untrue.

[theLOUDroom]

Where do you get the idea PGP incorporates the subject line into a signature? It doesn't. Only the message body is incorporated, and the message body remains constant across a huge number of emails.

You can use PGP to sign whatever you want. We're talking about a proposed implementation, not a current one.

The entire subject-line-alteration is a giant non sequitur.

No it's not. The subjevt line is part of the message, and it get's changed.

Re:Manifestly untrue.

[rjh]

You can use PGP to sign whatever you want. We're talking about a proposed implementation, not a current one.

See my other replies in this thread re: the idiocy of altering RFC 2440/3159/etc. to accomodate antispam advocates.

The subjevt line is part of the message, and it get's changed.

Quote me the relevant part of RFC 2440 (or 1991, for that matter) which indicates that the subject line is considered to be part of the message.

Free hint: there isn't one.

RTFrfc.

Mass mailing worm drives company bankrupt!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see in in the headlines already.

sounds like regulation

[A_Wandering_Nomad]

that won't solve the problem... This is a little extreme of an example, but this sounds alot like all the permits/licenses you need to get now a days.. Many of them exist to supposedly prevent criminal activity, but all it really does is hurt the average joe. The people who want to bypass the permits/licenses do so....

With open relays, forged headers, and all the other different ways you can slide through the email pipes, this doesn't sound like it will drastically reduce spam..

ignorant...this is how we get hidden taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

This kinda of ignorant plan is how we get over taxed, hidden taxes, etc. In fact the only people lower than spammers are politicians and lobbyists who are leaches on the very nature of society, doing very little and treating it as okay to just take a little from everybody so they don't have to work. Then selling it as though they're helping the down trodden.

Spam is not the responsibility of the government. Let the market solve the problem. It eventually will. Hell, I've solved it for myself. I've got 2 accounds both on a private domain and I use one for actual email and one for signing up for stuff. I get 0 (yes exactly 0) spam at my real address. The other is flooded but since I simply use it as a spamtrap, no biggie. Total cost about $120/year for domain, DNS, hosting, etc. And that's expensive because I host my DNS separately, pay for a static IP so I can host DNS separately, and use dynamic dns services for my domain so that my home machines are accessible through my DSL modem.

and another thing.....

[chef_raekwon]

not to mention third world countries....1 cent in the US or Canada, is equal to 4 or 5 cents for them...so will it be the North American and European ISP's taxing the shit out of those who already have nothing?

Bad idea

[glh]

The spammers will find a way to get around the tax. What's to stop them from getting around the tax? I think there is also a huge problem from an auditing perspective. How do you know who truly sent the e-mail? You'd have to specifically which person the e-mail came from. Much easier said than done. Multiple people may use the same machine, you have programs that send e-mail on "behalf" of people (example- any free e-mail web site), etc. There is no 100% way to link a person to their e-mail account.

My biggest concern however is that this will open a bigger can of worms. As soon as the government gets the idea in their head that they can tax e-mail, what's next? A tax on browsing slashdot and posting messages? A tax to posting in the newsgroups? etc. It's a slippery slope. Information should be free and untaxed, otherwise the internet will cease to be what it is. Maybe "internet2" could be taxed, but I'm all for freedom of information.

There is always a work around

[kjfitz]

Spamming already exists on the gray fringes of legality/ethicality (is that a word?) I can't imagine that charging a penny a letter would slow down a dedicated spammer at all. They'd simply send them without paying and continue to spoof / hide / relocate as required.

This, like many laws aimed at criminals, would make things marginally more inconvenient for honest people while ignoring the criminals.

It will never work.

[signingis]

Spammers use open (unsecured) SMTP relays. There's just no way to make people secure their machines. How are you going to track down who isn't? Start a special division? Great idea. How are you going to pay them? Why with the money from this new tax, of course. It would get bigger and bigger, trying to justify new tax increases to cover the costs of collecting those taxes. Great idea. Now, if a company gets fined $100,000 for a spammer using one of their machines to send 100m emails, do you think they'll stand for it? No way in Hell. There would be special provisions made for them or it would be repealed.

Viruses more harsh

[Sithgunner]

Now that viruses will make people unlucky to get caught with them pay alot =(

Also, that this tax thing may trigger to make more viruses to flood out mails from innocent computers.

I was once for the idea, but after a thought, no.

This has to be the dumbest !@#$ing idea...

[YinYang69]

Did a !@#$ing Democrat write the artible commented upon and presented to us here?

Cigarette taxes will stop cigarette use, they say. And while some people are quitting, most are ponying up the cash (which do not go for cancer treatments like they should), or getting cigarettes from different states.

In California, they want to put a similar tax on soda. Because it's unhealthy for you.

They tax the crap out of beer and liquor to protect you. To bolster their revenues which should go to the police to get people for DUIs, but go to any number of things.

Spam is the primordial sin of the Internet. And as with any sin, they want to tax it. And like any sin, they want to tax the !@#$ out of it. Then make promises like, "The proceeds to out to build a better, stronger Internet." What? Are you people !@#$ing kidding me? The Internet is run by telecoms and bureaucrats who don't need anymore of my money than they already get.

Don't worry, it's a progressive tax, so you don't have to pay. Horse!@#$. You're only spanking the small businesses in the country, who definitely don't need another $500.00 a year taken out of their increasingly shrinking revenues thanks to mega-conglomerate corporations playing the "I have more money than you" game.

Not to speak of the fact that if you tax these !@#$heads, you legitimize the whole !@#$ing industry. They can lobby with a purpose (read: vengeance) at that point. They've already got the association ready to go... The only reason why they've survived so long is because the other slice of capitalism gone seriously, seriously wrong, telemarketers, have fended the Government off of them because it could indirectly spank the telemarketing industry.

I think I speak for the majority of Americans on the issue: !@#$ you. Get out of my wallet and get back to your !#@$ing jobs. Figure it out or be honest and quit.

Problem and Possible solution.

[AftanGustur]

This will only turn into another money-making thing for the gov.. The "Tax" will go up and up until the governament will find the "right" price that people are willing to pay..

Instead of giving the 1 cent to mr TaxMan, it should instead be payed to the receiver of the email, to pay for the cost of bandwidth /disk / cpu / memory / time..

That way, companies wouldn't have to pay for internal mail, companies would have to pay people to receive their "junk", even if they subscribed to it, and the governament wouldn't be as triggerhappy in raising the cost of email.

Of course this means the death of Bugtraq and other free stuff, but you already understood that, no ?

No Way

[salesgeek]

While I usually like Lessig's ideas, this one is not good. Why? It's an expensive tax:

* Enforcement costs = expen$ive
* Requires central authority over email
* It's a tax, and in general taxes get bigger over time.

What is really needed to control spam is people that don't respond to it.

Re:No Way

[Zordok]

Just to get things straight...
Lessig is not the one who proposed the tax idea, he proposed the bounty idea. The author of the Financial Times article, Christopher Caldwell, proposed the tax idea.
From reading the /. posting, I can see how you could make this mistake - now you don't have to think "I usually like Lessig's ideas, but not his rediculous one about spam!" :)

How this will work:

[supabeast!]

1- U.S. Government gets another foothold into internet regulation, this time on email messaging, which will require very broad laws covering many forms of onine communication. Ouch.
2- The already millionare spammers join their servers on secluded islands in the South Pacific, idling away the hours with their grilfriends. Spam flow will continue, with no spammers within reach of U.S. prosecuters.
3- Numerous internet/technology companies join their encryption develping cohorts in moving from the U.S. to Europe/Canada, hurting the U.S. economy.

Would make it worse than ever!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now the only thing keeping coca-cola, etc. from your in box is the fact that it's barely legal to spam. If it were taxable, hence legal, then it would open the floodgates of legitimatized spam.
That's how it works, you don't hear them bitching about television advertising crowding out actual programming, and it's because amateur scammers cannot bark and yelp alongside the corporate thieves.

Pay-per-e-mail and whitelisting are the only ways

[analog_line]

Until there is a cost to sending e-mails, or there is widespread refusal to accept untrusted e-mail, the spam problem will never go away. If you blacklist almost everything, what you actually have is a whitelist. Just depends on which color you focus on. If you refuse to whitelist, the only way to stop spam is to create a completely unavoidable cost to sending e-mails. You can't make anything "progressive" because then spammers will create thousands of free garbage accounts on hotmail, etc, and automate them. Whether it's a tax or a universal fee charged by ISPs, it has to be on a per e-mail basis, and it has to be as universal as gravity. Otherwise, the spammers will find every loophole they can and abuse the hell out of them, and nothing will stop them.

never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

2 options - voluntary or involuntary.

Voluntarily, you can ignore email that isn't digitally signed and verified to have gone through some clearinghouse. There is, at best, a niche market for this. Email is one of those things that needs a network of others using it to be useful. Who would pay to be the only one with a telephone or a fax machine?

If it's not voluntary, good luck defining email without either being too broad (crushing lots of other protocols) or being too narrow and being trivial to avoid (no port 25? fine we'll use another port). If someone succeeds in telling us how we should be communicating with each other, what about other countries? The UN never seems to be able to agree about anything. The WTO doesn't cover enough countries. And in any case, what U.S. congressperson wants to have angry constituents complaining that "the home of the free" is a digital police state and that they're contemplating a move to China?

Spammer's already paying tax

[davepander]

With the advent of fines, Spammer's started paying tax. They consider a fine as a cost of doing business, and I am sure that they would continue even if we increased their cost of mailing by 1 cent per message. Yes, they would have to adjust their economics, but they already do that on a daily basis. Therefor, a tax would not stop SPAM at all, and would only hamper useful communication for the rest of us.

Internet Mail 2000

[freestyle-fiend]

Charging per email should be the last resort. It is unfair on those who do not abuse email (unless the price of the email is received by the person who bears the other cost of the message). It also increases the complexity of email. It would not eliminate spam.

A better way of easing the spam problem is to make the sender bear the cost of sending messages (not to artificially impose costs on the sender, but to relieve the recipient of the costs of spam). Why is Internet Mail 2000 not a suitable solution?

Unenforceable

[Gothmolly]

I own my own domain, and maintain my own mailserver. Who will levy this tax on me? Who will monitor my traffic? What if I set up an IPSec tunnel to Sealand, then route my mail out of there? This is one of the most idiotic things I've read in a while.

Ways to reduce spam

[romco]

1. Just charge spammers ... something like a $1.00 an email tax. And offer a 25% reward for turning them in.

2. Send the US military to capture spammers outside the US and lock them up as "unlawful combatants".

Tax? No thanks.

[mr3038]

The idea to tax all emails is terrible. First, only those who abuse the system (spammers) should suffer from any change we take and second, those of us with legimate needs (opt-in mailing list admins) must not be charged if it's possible to make it work without money (like it's working today). Trust me, I receive many mails from various mailing lists and I don't want to pay for those just so that the admin can cost the taxes to distribute the list contents.

In addition, spammers would try to workaround those taxes, and possibly succeed, just like they forge the headers of spam they send today. As a result, legimate users would pay the tax and spammers would send the spam for free. Adding some heavy-weight bureaucracy to the problem (tax system) isn't the solution.

The idea in A Bounty on Spammers article seems like a one possible way to go. It's not perfect because it doesn't get rid of the wasted bandwidth immediatly as it doesn't outlaw spam, only spam that isn't clearly marked as spam. I'm not entirely sure about the $10000 bounty the article suggests. I think it should be proportional to the number of spams sent -- say, $5 per spam sent. And make that $50 per spam sent if the spammer tried to forge headers! It would really hurt to send one million spams with forged headers unlike today.

Once we have [ADV:] in every spam we get, we can modify SMTP servers to return "555 Advertisements not allowed" if one tries to send a spam and save some wasted bandwidth.

Alternatively, once we get micropayments work, we can allow spammers to send spam that transfers some money to the reader once he reads the spam. Because sending spam doesn't cost anything, the spammer could choose to pay some small amount of money to get the receiver to read the spam.

You have 25 paid advertisements in your inbox. If you read all of those, you'll reveice $2 to your MicroPayments Account. What do you want to do? [Read advertisements] [Remove advertisements]"

Perhaps some poor guy could make a living reading spam?

Re:Tax? No thanks.

[Scooby Snacks]

Once we have [ADV:] in every spam we get, we can modify SMTP servers to return "555 Advertisements not allowed" if one tries to send a spam and save some wasted bandwidth.

How would it save bandwidth? The Subject: header is considered content, and follows the DATA SMTP command. The server does not interrupt the client until the client sends "\n.\n", so how does that work?

Re:Tax? No thanks.

[mr3038]

I wrote "we can modify SMTP servers to return '555 Advertisements not allowed'" and you wrote

How would it save bandwidth? The Subject: header is considered content, and follows the DATA SMTP command.

It doesn't save bandwidth between the spammer and initial access point but it would save bandwidth between that mail server and everything else (mail usually goes through more than one server, you know). In addition, spammers would quite quickly get a hint and they would need to rethink their strategy. Perhaps they could narrow their target audience so much they can take the hit from the bounty. As a result the number of spams would decrease heavily[1] even though there would be some spam still. Or perhaps they would simply change to some honest work.

[1] In this case they would probably use valid headers because otherwise the bounty would be too expensive. If not, we would need to readjust the forged headers punishment.

Right on dude....

[SerpentMage]

Exactly. Why is it that this topic keeps coming back from the grave? A small tax will do nothing to stop spammers since we have the USPS to prove that. Think of it, the USPS is charging about 40cents per letter? That is the price tag where email would cost the same as snail mail. Imagine 40 cents would be charged on the Internet? Can we say ghost town?

In this case technology is the only way that SPAM can be stopped.... Trust me it is the only way and it is not that hard.... Just some out of the box thinking...

Re:Right on dude....

[vlad30]

Actually can you imagine if it was cheaper besides In the mail I get 2-3 a day only and they at least try to target the mailing like a marksmen using a .22 instead of the shotgun method of spammers

I prefer spam...

[Anonymous Coward]

..over paying taxes..

You are stupid - if you think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Incidentally, charging for emails will only work with verified email addresses. So in addition to paying a penny for email, you get your email address added to a national database just for this to work.

Your general words add nothing to this topic.

This is only going to double my emails.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause it will take two emails to put in my 2 cents worth.

Authenticate the from field

[Anonymous Coward]

Did mail *really* come from XYZ mailserver?
if no, replace infos with where it *actually* came from.

if yes, proceed.

a very simple patch in the SMTP protocol would fix this ...

LOTS of problems then...

[NickFortune]

We've covered forged headers, the death of mailing lists, problems with internation jurisdiction and spiralling tax levels once govts get a taste of the revenue.

Anyone think the tax levels will stay set to exempt the provate individual at the expense of the corporations? Given that corps have more money than individuals, I'd guess the converse would be the case.

And then there's another international aspect. Govt's charging tariffs on email - anyone say "trade war?"

Really the only thing this has going for it is a plausible excuse for the government to find another way of extorting money from us. Spammers will continue to spam and the public will continue to pay and the governemt will sound ever more rightous on the subject.

Anyone else thinking "transparent government shill" by this stage?

Mandate "Precedence: bulk" header, with penalties

[Nathaniel]

That idea would only penalize those who use email legitimately, because people who spam would avoid paying the tax, or push the tax onto some unwitting victim.

Instead, mandate the already existing "Precedence: bulk" header every time a nearly identical message is sent to more than 50 people.

This would allow recipients to whitelist the mailing lists they subscribe to, and discard all other incoming email with the "Precedence: bulk" header.

The real problem with spam is that spam is sent to vast numbers of people, but it doesn't identify itself as being a bulk mailing.

By requiring that all bulk mailings be identified as such, and providing for penalties when the identification is missing, we can prosecute people who intentionally harm others, which is the basis of all legitimate law in the first place.

Successful prosecution would be possible when 20 different people bounce the same infringing message (unwanted bulk email without "Precedence: bulk" header) to their favorate spam prosecution group (different groups would have different rules about how they prosecute spam, who gets the proceeds of sucessful convictions, and which other spam prosecution groups they will work with). This provides a safety mechanism for people who send unobjectionable mailings and forget the "Precedence: bulk" tag, because it requires that there be victims. It also provides for credible testimony, because many people have to forward the same infringing message.

Changing a few characters here and there wouldn't matter, because a judge could evaluate the "nearly identical" clause.

If spammers would use the "Precedence: bulk" tag, we could easily filter out their unwanted messages.

If spammers had to compose new versions of their pitch for every 49 people they wanted to reach, they wouldn't be sending out nearly as many messages.

Good Idea in theory.

[jellomizer]

But in real life it is not going to work.

1. Whos job will it be to monitor all the e-mail traffic. The sender or the reciever.

2. Spammers use Open Relays or fine vulnerabilities in the persons system (thus able to send 1 message to a hundred users) or sending data threw a non smtp protocol. Thus avoiding the tax or minimizing it $.01 for a million messages. and the poor victim besides getting blacklisted has to pay $10,000 in taxes.

3. When being sent threw a foreign site. How do you collect taxes from them?

4. How do you enforce this?

It seems like a good idea in the perfect world but it is not. All this will end up doing is putting extra expense on the honest business man and individual. But most spammers are far from honest and would end up doing what they have been doing.

Re:Good Idea in theory.

[moncyb]

1. It will be Microsoft's job.
2. Palladium will fix this. It fixes everything. ;-)
3. They pay a license fee to M$.
4. M$ Palladium. Everyone needs a certificate to publish. Anyone who steps out of line (including by criticizing MS) will never be allowed on a computer again!

Likely Outcome

[LiquidCoooled]

You can picture it now - some quiet old lady whos doting son has set her up with a computer.
Opens the mail one morning to find a "tax" bill for 1000's of dollars for emails sent from her account.
Once she recovers from her heart attack, the son goes to check - as it happens, Grandma's curiosity got the better of her, and she opened that email attachment from Elvis..........

Unenforcable.

[The Fanta Menace]

I run my own server. Are they going to snoop my traffic to see how much email I send?

If so, I'll set up VPNs to the servers of people who I email regularly. Are they then going to demand to check my logs to ensure I'm paying the correct amount?

It's clear that economics morons who write crap like this have never read an SMTP RFC in their lifetime.

Re:Unenforcable.

[Jamie Lokier]

That's no different from real cash & goods, which change hands tax-free in the black economy.

It would be illegal, with considerable penalties for not declaring your emails, and yes from time to time they would demand access to and audit your logs, and also cross reference them against the logs of other people.

Just like the tax authorities do already with other kinds of tax.

-- Jamie

Re:Unenforcable.

[The Fanta Menace]

So, how about email to other people on the same server as me. Do I get taxed for that?

How about if I have a computer in my house, and I email other members of the household on it. Do I get taxed for that?

Or if I start communicating with people using a different protocol - maybe I hack at jabber and make it a form of an email delivery system, or do something similar with a bot on IRC. Do I get taxed for that?

Do I get taxed for all of the email that my root account sends me through cron jobs? Do I get taxed multiple times if I send a single email to multiple people? How about if all those people were only sitting on the same server and hence only a single SMTP connection is required to connect to it?

It's totally unenforcable. And unworkable.

I already pay for my internet..

[ixxologic]

I pay a monthly fee to get access to the internet and bandwidth.. so now suddenly email shold be excluded from that and mean an extra fee?.. So what about AD SPAM?.. Soon there will be a 1p charge per letter i send across IRC?.. Well fuck off! NOT HAPPENING! This is why ppl PIRATE SOFTWARE because theres too many little goddamn fees everywhere that piles up to WAY TOO MUCH!.. Those worried about banwdith should have thought about spam sooner and spent some actual brainpower on thinking about it then and not come later and try and blame us and shove the price onto OUR shoulders.. ixxo

Cant work in current internet

[Anonymous Coward]

While suggesting a email tax has always been an interesting idea, it can never work so long as email remains a peer service with no central point. Who would collect this tax? ISP's? What about people who run ip connections in other lands and just inject email as usual? What about zombied machines taken over to spew spam? Should the victum have a multimillion mail bill?

Until or unless there is centralized routing of email, mandated in law, and implimented universally, this kind of proposal will never work. Of course, centralized routing would make the job of eschelon a bit easier...as well as tracking down those nasty people who wish to exchange email in private through encryption so they can be rounded up for the encryption re-education camps, or just detained as potential "enemy combatents" indefinately... :)

Only one way to eliminate spam

[gregor-e]

Spam only works because it makes money. If each of us will dedicate just 10 minutes a day to requesting as many brochures and tying up as many resources of a spaming company as possible, it would quickly become apparent that spam is the most effective way for companies to lose lots of money.

Heard Before . . .

[Dausha]

". . . [spam] will soon constitute a majority of American e-mail; it already makes up 70 per cent of the traffic passing through the servers of America Online, the country's largest internet service provider (ISP)."

(From the article)

I thought Windows Update comprised 60 percent of bandwidth used? Between the two, 130 percent of our bandwidth is used up.

". . . very soon, the Internet should turn into a penny post, with a levy of 1 cent per letter."

I've heard this before. Don't you guys remember the allegations that the US Postal Service demanded the penny tax be levied and given to them? That was some chain letter bunk then; so what is it now?

"The tax moratorium on internet sales has always been supremely unfair, offering, say, Amazon a de facto subsidy against taxpaying local bookstores."

Sounds to me more like the author is really building a case to levy online sale taxes, not e-mail tax. With state governments claiming they are running huge debts because of dropping revenues, this makes sense. California (I'm not from there, so I can only go from what I hear) taxes everything like crazy and still cannot make ends meet. So, I opine the problem is the state governments cannot managed their spending. Seeing my own state nearly quadrupling the per capita tax in the past twenty years (in real dollars), without marked improvement in services provided I'm not convinced its a revenue problem.

I'm against taxation for taxation's sake. But, the more effective way of obtaining the tax is to increase income tax rates on online sales. The net effect is still revenue for the government. It gets through a lot of the potential issues involved in figuring out which state gets the revenue--handling multi-state income tax is more mature than a more ad hoc Internet Sales tax.

IANACPA This has a short-term benefit to the coastal states since they tend to have more online commerce sites--although I assume a fair amount of online sales is also conducted in the same states. However, it also allows competition between states where the middle America states could offer benefits to seduce corporatations--and increase their revenues by winning their incorporation.

It lets our governments tax foreigners--because we all know that corporate income tax is actually borne by the consumer through increased retail prices. More importantly, the taxation would be more noticable to the shareholders of corporations since income tax is an expense, and that sales tax is not.

Additionally, corporations lobby. They have a vested interest in keeping their prices low to keep their revenue coming in. If they are threatened with a higher income tax, again borne by the consumers, then they will lobby to negate or reduce the impact of this tax. They won't care as much about sales tax.

Oh my

[soccerisgod]

That's the most stupid idea I have heard all day, and that's saying a lot.

Besides the fact this is absolutely not technically possible (how do you want to do the accounting?), it would require cooperation from all internet-connected countries in the world. Somehow, I doubt that will happen.

Snail-Mail Direct-Marketing Is SPAM

[ausoleil]

And the price of printing and postage has not deterred firms and organizations from sending me several pieces of unsolicited pieces of snail-mail every day. How would "stamped" e-mail be any different? My take is that it wouldn't.

In fact, it might make it worse, as e-stamps would legitimize sending un-solicited commercial e-mail. You can hear the spammers now: "Hey, I paid my one cent, I can send anything I want!"

And, at the same, time *I* have to pay to send my non-commercial e-mail, paying into a government which really does nothing to provide internet connectivty. So, essentially, you are asking me to pay a price to supposedly prevent something to an entity which would provide me nothing in return. After all, would the ISP's not charge for an account if there were an e-mail tax? Heck no. If anything they would raise their prices because of the additional burden of accounting, accounting software, tax analysts and the like. That has me paying a DOUBLE premium for something I am not doing? Forget that!

Who bills the cat?

[AndroidCat]

Okay, let's imagine this idiotic scheme was tried. (Tough, I know.) How do they plan it implement it? Any machine can be a mail sender. Even machines with port 25 outgoing blocked can still send to an open proxy via a number of other ports. So how do they plan to meter and collect the tax?

I guess we'll have to wait a while until someone develops a psychic postage meter that can be bolted to every computer. (The improved super-psychic meter can detect the difference between email to the network at large, and internal company email.)

The wrong place

[boatboy]

You will not find any answer from the government to the spam problem that does not have worse side effects. Why the hell would I pay $10 a year- a price that would most definitely go up- for another beuaracracy to manage my email.

The best solutions to spam- and just about anything- come from the private sector or private/public research and always will. Putting this in the hands of government would stifle innovation, cost taxpayers more, and end up being a half-baked service. If you doubt it, compare USPS to FedEx or UPS, or check out the computers at your local government office.

As for offering a better solution, fingerprint-based filtering like CloudMark works the best for me- catching 90% with no false-positives. Sure, it could be improved, and I think ultimately a sort of automated white-list would be the best solution. But I can tell you the worst idea is getting the FTC involved and socializing email.

-dr

how about a tax on

[hopeless case]

people who seem to get their kicks out of suggest new taxes?

NO

[Anonymous Coward]

That's "N," followed by "O." If spam bothers you that much, switch to a whitelist protected account. Don't call for a tax on my correspondence.

proceeds

[bhamm]

The proceeds could go to maintain and expand bandwidth

...sure, it could.. except that it wont. How's the weather on your planet?

good article on micropayments

[sootman]

Lots of good points have already been made, so I won't rehash them (and I'm only looking at +5 already!) but here's a good article on why micropayments will never, ever, ever, ever [emphasis mine] work by Clay Shirky.

Not this again...

[briareus]

Which government will levy this tax and oversee its collection? How exactly will the tax pay for bandwith? And how effectively and efficiently is our government's current income form tax being spent?

You charge me money...

[the_truk_stop]

And I'll personally help my friends set up their own GPG keys, and make all of my "email" encrypted and available on an FTP server running on my box. Only the person it's intended for would be able to read it. I'd rather run the risk of someone trying to break encryption to see how I phrased "Hello, my week is going well" than pay for what has become a right: free email.

We don't need the government to stop spam

[jetlagQ]

what we need is a system that, for every email sent, sends some identification data (through a separate connection). before an email is accepted, the email sender info would be matched with the identification data. upon user receipt of the mail, user would have a set period (3 days? 7 days?) during which they could opt to charge the sender a "receipt fee." of, say a dime.

now if i sent a friend an email and he charged me a dime i might be upset or think it a joke but if a spammer sent out a million emails and nobody wanted it, it would cost them a cool chunk of change!

i'm sure there are some other ideas out there that would make sense but the last thing i want to see in my inbox is:

Sender: US Gov
Subject: We're from the government and we're here to help you.

I'm sorry I don't want a tax

[Christianfreak]

Lessing is a loony. E-mail services are privatly owned by ISPs, its already taxed with sales tax when you pay your monthly connectivity bill. We don't need a new tax on infrastructure that the government has nothing to do with.

If the gov is going to get involved then they need to make unsolicited email illegal, as well as working with other countries to make it illegal there as well. That gives us the right to bring charges against those ISPs and individuals who are sending it, and things like SpamAssasin can take care of the rest.

Tax ALL packets!

[AndroidCat]

Radical I know, but since email can be sent from any machine, and on a number of ports if proxies are used, it's the only way to go. This will also stop DDOS attacks and port scanning because of the cost involved.

Sure it'll work .. on Uranus!

Another English major pretending to be an engineer

[kuroth]

Let's just take a look at Mr. Caldwell's ideas:

In the House, Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, backs an idea of Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford internet guru. She wants hackers who track down the worst offenders to get huge bounties. This is a terrible idea that will make millionaires of two classes of people: reprobates who illegally maraud through others' hard drives;

Maraud through others' hard drives? Um, how?

No, really. How?

Granted, I've only read Rep. Lofgren's press release on the proposed measure, but I don't see anything in there about Joe Citizen going out and investigating spammers himself. It only talks about rewards for "information that leads to the successful collection of civil fines". There's nothing about hacking a spammers system, staking out his house, or the employment of any other invasive methods.

I can appreciate hyperbole as much as the next guy, but you're way off base here.

and those who have built their expertise about spam by peddling it.

...because sending spam is the only way to learn anything about spam, right?

Oh, wait...

Charles Schumer, New York's Democratic senator, has a better approach: a do-not-spam list with stiff fines, modelled on the one the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will launch this summer to tackle the suddenly quaint-seeming problem of phone solicitation.

This solution ignores so, so many things.

I have better than seventy email addresses that come to me. I'm webmaster@, hostmaster@, and abuse@ a few dozen domains. Do I have to register each and every one of those addresses in order to make them off-limits to spammers?

What happens when a spammer in Korea or Brazil harvests this list and sends spam to the addresses on it? We can't exactly send the local sheriff over to his office to serve him.

Even if the list was blind - i.e. you can only see if a specific address exists on it, rather than downloading the whole thing - it'll only serve as a confirmation system for dictionary attacks. Rather than sending dummy mail to every possible ten-character-or-less username at a given domain, a spammer can just bounce his list off the do-not-spam list server for confirmation. If anything, this makes getting valid addresses substantially easier.

The do-not-call database only works because it's no easier to exploit than a simple sequential war dialer attack, and expensive for international operaters to make telemarketing calls from outside U.S. jurisdiction. Attempting to apply the same solution to a fundamentally different medium is completely unworkable.

Spam is different

Well, at least you get that. Now, apply that knowledge.

because the marginal cost of sending additional solicitations is virtually zero. To the spammer, that is. The entire infrastructure for this enterprise is subsidised by other people:

This is a common oversimplification. Except in cases of utilization of open relays - something we already have a marginally workable technical solution for dealing with - this isn't entirely true. The spammers still need a few servers on their end with which to send out the mail.

They used to need bandwidth, too, but that's gotten so cheap that it's not even worth talking about. Again, though, there's a technical solution: Broadband ISP's need to be more vigilant about their customers' behavior.

(
Yes, this includes blocking port 25 for dialup customers. I know this is an unpopular notion here on /., but it's something that I happen to agree is necessary. If you want to run a business off the end of a connection, you should get a real business connection. The reduction in spam volume that would come from simply prohibiting mail servers behind dynamic connections is too large of a win to ignore.

Well, I am putting in my two cents.

[cpsc2005]

I t

Re:Create a new medium, don't try to fix the old o

[AndroidCat]

.. would not be music to Dept. of Homeland Security's ears

Oh, I dunno. Just think of the fun that they have have by being able to yank or otherwise diddle with someone's email certification.

Ridiculous

[TwistedSpring]

Sure most people would pay $10, and sure companies might pay $100 or $1000, but you forget that $1000 doesnt much matter for large companies. $1000 is an incredibly cheap advertising campaign, and wouldn't taxing mails effectively legitimize spam? If someone has PAID a reputable organization in order to send each message, the recipient has less of a basis to moan about it.

Truth is, most spam comes from posting up your email address on the 'net and having some sort of spider pick it up. Best way to stop this? Set up a simple website where you register your mail address, it gets MD5ed, and you can then be contacted through a webform using that MD5 key in the URL (the form will then transmit the email to you). This not only prevents spam, it allows people to mail you when they dont have a mail client available to them. Everyone wins, except the spammers. People who want to be anonymous could of course exploit this system (unless HTTP headers were included with the resultant mail).

International Law?

[Boy Jenius]

This is a great idea, but only if the United States were the only country in the world with e-mail. Couldn't the spammers move their operations into other nations (or into international waters) to dodge the tax? I see this as a distinct possiblity, as spammers already regularly bounce their mail off of servers overseas.

That's won't solve ANYTHING!!

[leeet]

How do you charge someone who ILLEGALLY connects to your machine via port 25 and sends loads of emails? Will the "pseudo-sender" get the bill?

That works fine if everyone plays by the rules but spammers uses any way possible to send email, including using broken (mis-configured) proxies and hacks into bad mailto scripts on web sites.

Spammers don't use their personal email to spam, 1st of all, they use something like bigjohn@kjsdhfkjhdsf.com then they find backdoors. That just won't work at all unless the sendmail process is completely re-writen to use tokens to proof the existance of the sender. (recipient can check on the sender's server to confirm the token. No token, no mail) Even this will let "legitimate" spammers, but it will be much easier to control, especially if there is a spammer DB that sendmail can import. I think this is an easy system, it only (!) requires that people accept it. I think it can be run in parallel until most servers are upgraded.

My 2 cents...

I have a better idea.

[shren]

Instead of having a 'tax', work out micropayments. Then, every time you send an email, you send a penny with it. So if a friend and I send 100 emails back and forth, the net money loss for the two of us is zero - because we are essentially passing the same penny back and forth. For the average person, this would mean not 10 dollars a year but almost nothing - because most people, ignoring spam, send about as much mail as they receive.

For spam companies, this penny an email would turn into a tremendous outflow of cash, because they send millions of emails with little or no response. There's no reason to give money to some central government authority when passing it back and forth between ourselves works just as well. I personally would enjoy a steady leak of cash from the spammer's pockets into yours and mine.

Internet cost quintupled?

[MattW]

To put it another way, if you use dialup, you quintupled your cost, or more, because of this tax. A 500-1000% tax on your service costs? Never mind enforcement for the moment, I say. Just make using spam unequivocably illegal first.

Re:Internet cost quintupled?

[SN74S181]

I thought everybody was claiming that Spam costs ISP's huge amounts of money. Clearly if that's the case, the cost of this 'tax' will be offset by the savings it produces.

Or is that 'spam costs us lots of money' argument just rhetoric?

Tax Jurisdictions abroad?

[Mewf]

So what happens if I, a resident in Spain, wish to send email via a British mailserver to an American recipient? This is somethign I actually do regularly, as well as recieve email stored on a UK POP account. Where do I pay the tax? Could spammers just get around it by using offshore mailservers in countries that won't bother to put in a tax?

Hell, thinking about it, how would you define the sendign of email? A quick traceroute to my ISP's SMTP server shows that the packets from my machine get to that server via france, the UK, The netherlands, and belgium. This is *before* I even start esending the email. Would I end up having to pay 1 Eurocent to each of these jurisdictions just because my ISP doesn't have a local peering agreement with its ADSL provider?

The internet is a global phenomenon. Stop thinking in terms of US only.

The end of email

[nurb432]

You already pay taxes on your internet service, your pc and utilities..

Adding an additional tax directly onto each email would pretty much kill the system.

People would cut back on its use to the bare minimum, as people do with paper mail now.

The US postal service keeps claiming they are loosing money, its not really that. The volume of internet mail is due to the near zero cost of each email, nothing more. If the cost was raised, the volume would go down. Pretty simple concept.

But I agree SOMETHING has to be done, as I'm sick and tired of paying to receive this crap every day. That includes popups too.. not just
Spam-email..

And don't tell me I'm not paying.. I pay for my power bill, my ISP, my bandwidth, my drive space, my time..

Wrong and overly simplistic solution to spam.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is how some of the greatest blunders in the world get created, when people instinctively react without thoroughly analyzing a problem and the pros and cons of each potential solution.

What in the world does the government have to do with bits being sent from one computer to another, and why should the government automatically get money for it without my consent? What if the machines were all within an intranet wholly owned by me? Of course the risk of spam would be much less, but try to see the point because some will unfairly (and very unreasonably) be taxed. A blanket process like that would, in the long run, only be of benefit to one person - Uncle Sam. Not the consumer.

I also highly doubt that these taxes can possibly be collected while also maintaining the anonymity of sender and receiver.

And rather than pay Uncle Sam indefinitely each time I send an e-mail, I would much rather invest that money in anti-spam software. That seems to make much more sense to me.

Re:Wrong and overly simplistic solution to spam.

[vaylen]

The solution that would work best would be one where the Govermnment does not collect any money. If every time you send an e-mail it cost you 1 penny that was paid to the RECIPIENT of the e-mail that would be a zero sum game for most of us but would put spammers out of business (not to mention make me about $10 a week based on the spam that I get). The Government comes in where fraud is evident, like when someone's e-mail account gets commandeered to spam. In that case the ISP of the mail account in question would have to pony up the cost. This would serve to make ISP's more accountable to spammers (overseas as well). What about ISP's in other countries who don't play by the rules?(you listening China?) If you don't play by the rules, your IP gets removed from the trough. The users of that ISP will complain enough to force them to comply. Any solution will have loopholes that need to be fixed before they are exploited, but this seems like a fair solution.

What about "free" web-mail accounts?

[lithium100]

If every email is taxed, services like hotmail and yahoo would be innaccessible to people like teenagers. As they would most likely need a credit card to pay for the account.

Of course, if there is a tax free threshold of say 5000 emails per annum, whats stopping potential spammers from signing up to one account, sending 5000 emails, signing up to another account, sending another 5000 emails and so on...?

What I don't get...

[Atmchicago]

Is how people get so much spam. I have an email acct from an ISP, and get no spam on that, and I have a hotmail account, which only gets spam. I never use the hotmail one, so spam just isn't a problem!

My impression is that either people sign up for a bunch of stuff online and get spam because they give their e-mail adress away, or else Hotmail and other e-mail services give away their e-mail addresses to spammers. Stop those two things and it should be ok, no need to tax.

The Government will help us!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, let the government get a foothold into the Internet industry. We need your records for tax purposes, so we don't need a warrant. Good-bye privacy!

Besides, we all know the kind of efficiencies (and high profits) getting the government involved is guaranteed to bring, what with faceless civil servants following obscure laws and regulations by the letter, only during the hours of 8-4.

Not to mention that you'd need to record the number of e-mails sent, print tax receipts (in triplicate) and order new forms from Moore.

Any "profits" made from this new program would rapidly be eaten by the bureaucracy, and probably end up costing the taxpayer even more, regardless of whether or not they even had a computer.

Yeah, great idea Sparky.

TANSTAAFL

Bad, bad idea.

[Opinari]

Speaking for myself, I refuse to pay an email tax so Big Brother can filter my emails for me. In such a system, bulk rate fees would become inevitable (big businesses would have a cow if they had to pay "per parcel"). Larger telemarketers would gladly pay that bulk rate, and the problem would persist.

I would much prefer to use about a minute of my time to simply delete the emails that I don't want. Quite simply, I want to be able to choose the status quo, which is fine with me. Let's hope this urban legend stays an urban legend.

A proposal

[MattW]

Instead of trying to figure out how to 'practically' control spam, just put the weight of the law on the right side first.

(1) Spam is unequivocably illegal. Commercial email requires that you be able to tell exactly where your address was acquired and under what terms. A single communication to that party or their designated substitute must eliminate you from all emailings associated with that acquisition point (even if you once agreed to receive email) within X hours (I'd say 72). This prevents 'opt-in' abuse. (Most of those who claim this are full of it anyhow, so you must maintain records of how the person opted in -- form data they filled out, the IP they came from, the date and time, the site they were on, etc, before you can even claim opt-in, aside from the above limitations)

(2) No cause of action can be brought against an ISP for terminating a client's services for UCE sending. The burden is on the client to prove their use is fully legal, and if they send to addresses without a record to justify the sending, they can and should be terminated. But the law supercedes any and all contracts.

(3) RBL lists are recognized in law as lists of people who have chosen to opt out of email based on certain criteria. Because use of an RBL is voluntary, legal action against an RBL for providing RBL services is barred. This includes any claims against an RBL provider on the grounds of slander (insofar as an entry on the list is not considered to be slander or libel) or negligence. In other words, an RBL simply becomes speech, and placing people on a list is presumptively considered to be not libel or defamation or slander unless a claimant can conclusively prove false statements, in which case the only remediation becomes removal from the list in question. Monetary damages for placement on an RBL completely disappear.

The only thing left on my wishlist is a way to make the beneficiaries of spam liable even if they didn't send it. The problem then becomes with people who advertise maliciously in order to create penalties for an innocent company.

One this is in place, we start working on enforcement treaties with other countries. Ultimately, the rule of thumb becomes: if you're going to connect someone to the Internet, you need to have enough information from them to identify them after the fact if evidence is presented that implicates them in spam-sending.

Re:A proposal

[Steve B]

I would add:

4. Attempts to circumvent anti-spam filters are treated as a form of computer cracking. For example, throwing random junk into spam messages to avoid having the messages recognized as identical or to obfuscate terms commonly found in anti-spam filters would carry the same penalties as throwing a dictionary at a password prompt or exploiting a backdoor.

After all, both activities are aimed at precisely the same result: gaining unauthorized access to someone else's computer in violation of the owner's express prohibition.

Penis Enlargment Pill

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha, /me laughs royally at all you Americans. Where will you buy your penis enlargement pills now? Bwhahaha, you will become a nation of men with tiny penises, while we Europeans roam around with our humongous pill-enhanced penises

Taxation

[Orne]

So you know, the original income tax was first instituted to help fund the civil war, at 1/2% tax. It was later repealed, as it was found unconstitutional in the courts for the government to tax income.

But congress tried again in 1913, and was a 1% tax on the top 1% wage earners (in 1913, those that earned $3k to $20k per year).

Fast forward to today, and take a look at how far we've let the government tax our earnings... today, the top 1% wage earners pay 38.6% of their salary in taxes, accounting for ~ 29% of the total (top 5% wage earners paid 50% of all taxes in 1999)

Now we have people saying, "I don't mind paying $0.01 for my emails"... What restraint has the government ever shown that next year it'll be $0.02, then $0.05 (who'll miss a nickle?), a dime... And where the hell will all this money go? into improving the internet infrastructure? Nooo, that's a private business. The money and accountability will disappear, probably into Medicare, Social Security, and all the other social programs that government isn't supposed to be in.

Government control is not a road we want to walk down folks. Yes, control of communications through taxation. I can't understand why the crowd complains when little things are being taken away, and the same people just turn around and hand the big ones over willingly.

Re:Taxation

[Anonymous Coward]

What we DON'T need is another tax. It's too darned hard to get it removed... Remember that we're still paying taxes to fund the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, and on and on. It never stops.

Spam is too easy to filter, I don't worry about it.

Re:Taxation

[Anonymous Coward]

Orne - you hit the nail on the head.

The government is supposed to support necessary infrastructure and defend the country.

What does that mean? Roads. Tax the cars and make them register. License fees. etc.

Defense. Fine. Tax me for that.

The internet? A private interprise paid by private individuals. Can ANYone explain why the government should get involved? The answer is: they shouldn't. Any more than they should get involved if I want to sell a car I own to my daughter.

But, as in my example of the car, it really doesn't matter. The legislaters of this county are so fucked up they think they should tax EVERYTHING. The death ta.... err... "estate tax". Yes you earned it, but by god you have too much money, so now you get to give half of it away if you decide to up and die on them.

The social securty tax, taken directly out of MY income. So now, because I work to earn a living, I have to pay for people who don't?

It goes on and on. If it exists, they believe that they have the right to tax it. And we'll lose every time.

Re:Taxation

[Anonymous Coward]

So you know, the original income tax [tax.org] was first instituted to help fund the civil war, at 1/2% tax. It was later repealed, as it was found unconstitutional in the courts for the government to tax income.
[snip]
Fast forward to today, and take a look at how far we've let the government tax our earnings... today, the top 1% wage earners pay 38.6% [fairmark.com] of their salary in taxes, accounting for ~ 29% of the total (top 5% wage earners paid 50% [allegromedia.com] of all taxes in 1999)
[snip]
And where the hell will all this money go? into improving the internet infrastructure? Nooo, that's a private business. The money and accountability will disappear, probably into Medicare, Social Security, and all the other social programs that government isn't supposed to be in.

Although I basically agree that the U.S. government isn't fiscally responsible, isn't it funny how people who complain that taxes are too high never complain about the military budget? It's always complaints about welfare and social security, not education and transportation. I suspect that these two links (here and here) illustrate the problem clearly... different people are listening to different sources of information. Mars and Venus, I tell ya' :)

What it boils down to is that individual spending projects need to be evaluated individually. Sure taxes were lower once, but then again there was no Department of Energy or Department of Transportation back then, was there?

Government control is not a road we want to walk down folks. Yes, control of communications through taxation. I can't understand why the crowd complains when little things are being taken away, and the same people just turn around and hand the big ones over willingly.

On a related note, there was no FCC in 1913 either. But there is now.

For the umpteenth time.

[j1mmy]

You cannot tax e-mail. It's technically infeasible and nobody will ever support it.

Sounds like how income taxes started

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds an awful lot like how income taxes started. Same for State of Ohio Income Tax, that once was just a small amount..... and now is a large amount.

tax, how unoriginal and probably useless

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the tax solution is far too simplistic to work. There is nothing to stop a spammer from setting up his own email server on some foriegn isp (that does not care about spam) and blasting email messages out as they do now. The internet is global therefore a "tax" would not work. Who gets the tax the isp's or the 200 or so govt's around the world and lets not forget the local, provincial and regional governments will want a piece as well.

That tax will be a slippery slope to a less free internet. For one thing it is bound to go up and up and up. And in addition it will no longer be possible to sent email without reporting it to the government or an isp tax collector who may be bound by law to report it. While this may help fight spam a bit, it will completely sacrifice our ability to send email privately without being monitored by government intelligence services.

Think outside the box.

[uberdave]

I'm going to guess that you're an american. Americans tend to have this blind spot that extends from their borders and works outward. Most of them tend to ignore (and be ignorant of)the rest of the world. For example, in the movie Outbreak a plague is sweeping across the States. There is a scene where they extrapolate the spread of the disease. Curiously, it never crosses the borders.

The idea of taxing email, or having a government sender verification site, contains the assumtion that the internet is somehow contained in a single country. When a Pakistani is sending an email to a Turk, who's government website is the Turk supposed to check? What is the tax to be paid in? What happens with a country that decides that it will not comply, how do you check the key?

Spam is an international problem. It cannot be fixed by a national solution. Legislation will not work, because there will always be countries which do not comply. If there is going to be a solution to spam, it is going to be a technical solution, not a legal one.

Re:Think outside the box.

[PhoenixFlare]

I'm going to guess that you're an american. Americans tend to have this blind spot that extends from their borders and works outward. Most of them tend to ignore (and be ignorant of)the rest of the world. For example, in the movie Outbreak a plague is sweeping across the States. There is a scene where they extrapolate the spread of the disease. Curiously, it never crosses the borders.

And i'm going to guess that you're a rather short-sighted European or Asian, that bases a large part of their opinion of over 250 million people on small bits of popular culture.

Grow up. Contrary to what Hollywood would like you to believe, the daily life of most Americans is vastly different than the movies.

That said, maybe the original poster meant that a multi-national government site should be set up, one that (almost) anyone in the world could use?

Nowhere in:

or end users could check a government web site to make sure the license key is valid and that the spammer had paid their tax.

did he make the jump to:

The idea of taxing email, or having a government sender verification site, contains the assumtion that the internet is somehow contained in a single country.

Sure, it wouldn't be perfect, and as you say, some countries wouldn't comply...But it would be a start. I'm sure it'd be a far cry from the vision you probably have of Americans (or anyone) trying to contain the internet in a single country...You seriously need a clue if you think it would ever turn out that way.

Re:Think outside the box.

[journeyman101]

Well said Phoenix. I agree that Americans are many times judged based on the attitudes/actions of a small percentage of buttheads.

Also, refresh my memory...where did the Internet start?

Re:Think outside the box.

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Americans are many times judged based
>> on the attitudes/actions of a small
>> percentage of buttheads.

>> Also, refresh my memory...where did
>> the Internet start?

In the great U.S.A... butthead.

P.S. Nice one.

Re:Think outside the box.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't YOU gtow up and smell the roses. He DOES have a point. Spam IS international problem and he has a point when he mentions Americans as short sighted. Not to mention "Language challanged".

Re:Think outside the box.

[PhoenixFlare]

Why don't YOU gtow up and smell the roses. He DOES have a point. Spam IS international problem and he has a point when he mentions Americans as short sighted. Not to mention "Language challanged".

This from someone that can't even write proper English themselves...Oh, the irony is priceless...

Just for the record, I'm 22 years old, a born English speaker, I know passable Spanish, and i'm slowly teaching myself Japanese as well. Also, my girlfriend used to speak fluent Spanish, although she's gotten a little rusty after switching jobs and not using it for a while.

I'm not sure if the requirements have changed either way now, but back when I was in high school, the state (New York) requirements mandated that everyone had to take either Spanish, French, German, or Italian classes until their 3rd year of high school...11th grade for most Americans, not sure what that equates to in other countries.

So, yet again, i'm guessing you're either European or Asian as the other poster was, and quite short-sighted yourself...You anti-American sorts love sweeping generalizations, don't you?

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against non-Americans - my family has roots in 3 or 4 European countries - but people like you and the original poster make it awful hard to form positive opinions sometimes.

Re:Think outside the box.

[ReelOddeeo]

I'm going to guess that you're an american. Americans tend to have this blind spot that extends from their borders and works outward.

You are correct.

I was implicitly making the assumption that if we tax spam in America, that no spammers will be based in America. Spammers from overseas will find themselves the targets of efforts to collect the tax or block the spam. Countries that don't do something about spam may find themselves cut off from at least the American part of the Internet. This might actually have some effect, even more so than the UDP which does not carry the force of law. The fact is, if the spammer collects money in the US, it can be taxed or even siezed here. This does not stop spam everywhere, but it might have a huge effect.

Another implicit assumption is that some other nations that have many of the same values as us, might do the same. Maybe I'm niave, but imho, this might really have some actual effect on spam.

You're right about another thing. As much as Congress might not like it, their laws, for some strange reason, only have effect within our borders. Since I can't affect what happens in your country, I will try to affect what happens in mine. And hopefully, the result might even have a positive effect for you also.

On the other hand, we have Dubya in power now, and so soon, especially if he survives a re-election, at least in his own mind, it may be academic about where America's borders begin and end. :-) Got to stop terrorism, you know.

Stupid idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone is up in arms about spam, but I don't see the big deal. Spam is easily recognizable and easy to delete. I probably don't spend more than 10 seconds per day on spam. It's not worth a penny per email to get my 10 seconds back.

Why Tax When You Won't Punish?

[Toad-san]

What a stupid idea.

The problem is identifying the miscreants. If the system can't (or won't) identify spammers now, will they then when a tax is in place? I don't think so.

If you can identify the spammers, you can prosecute them. It doesn't take a tax. We simply refuse to force the system to identify all senders. Why should ANYONE be permitted to send ANYTHING unless the sender can be identified by anyone? Tell me again how a legitimate Internet user can be harmed by his identity being known and linked to his email, hmmmmm?

It's quite simple for any node to reject any email that doesn't have a verifiable (and existing) sender. Nodes don't have to check ALL the email that passes through; just enough of it to eventually identify and filter out any spam.

Then ANYONE should be able to identify (and shut down or prosecute) the actual spam senders.

End of problem.

(Although the PGP signature on every single email message was a good idea too.)

Our problem is that the fix appears to be in for the spammers .. or (more likely) too many folks (especially right here at Slashdot) are paranoid about identity protection and the First Amendment.

It seems that it would probably be all right for someone to burst into my living room, in a black hood, and scream obscenities and death threats. In fact, from what I read here, people have the RIGHT to burst into my living room ...

But I digress ...

Does Lessig truly understand the Internet?

[Krieger]

I get thousands of emails a day. By choice. I'm actively involved in many online communities. This requires the ability to send a lot of email. This email also is not spam. Charging per email is a horrific idea and will decimate the Internet. The reason why it works so well is the easy free flow of information. To fundamentally alter that infrastructure would allow, among other things, the Internet to be turned into that wonderful pay per view per occurence system that commercial organizations want.

This really is the last thing I would have expected from Lessig.

Slashdot readers

[Anonymous Coward]

This thread is very insightful. Most Slashdot readers see no problem with taxing the rich to death, because "they have enough money." But try to tax EVERYONE EQUALLY (1 cent!) and all hell breaks loose. You guys are so pathetic and hypocritical. You can handle 1 cent, now cough it up.

(BTW.. taxes suck and I don't support this idea, but the point stands. You're all hypocrits.)

Re:Slashdot readers

[dentar]

..then go elsewhere and quit reading it.

Re:Slashdot readers

[IMSoP]

I disagree entirely with the idea that "taxing everyone equally" is somehow a Good Thing, whereas taxing those who can actually afford it is going to kill them.

If you person A has £1000000 (or $, or , or equivalent), and person B has £10, through no fault of their own. Doesn't it make some kind of sense to make person A help out person B a bit if they need, say, a £15 life-saving operation?

And hey, we live in a capitalist world, remember, so person A's money was probably made by squeezing as much out of person B & friends as possible in the first place.

[Oh, and one more thing: we're not talking about 1 cent per person, we're talking about 1 cent per email. Big difference.]

Great Idea! Let the Government Tax Email!

[hndrcks]

The govt. can develop a system to examine the contents of each email and determine which ones are valid correspondence, charging the end-user a micropayment of 1 cent and dumping the mail with forged headers, virii, etc. Simple!

Now all we need is a system that can examine all the email content.

This might work...

[LHN]

This could work, but what if the spammers tack on the cost of the tax, and just raise the prices of their "services". Instead of going after the spammers we should be going after the companies who pay the spammers to advertise.
Fines will not help either, penalties have to be harsh. ie. Ban them from being able to do business in our market.

Yeah, that's a good idea

[taustin]

A) Taxes are levied by government. Which government? The US? Are we going to bomb a long time ally like South Korea of Tawain because their spammers didn't pay their taxes to the US government?

B)Spammers break the law already. There is no technical way to enforce such a scheme that spammers cannot bypass, short of completely rewriting the SMTP RFCs to force everyone to only accept email from government (what government?) licensed servers. Yeah, everyone will be lining up to sign on for that.

C) How do you handle mailing lists? Is it now impossible to run a mailing list without charging everyone on it?

D) It's a stupid idea, and only a moron could possibly not realize it.

Go for CA/PKI and white-lists!

[axxackall]

So, in order to enforce such a law, we have to make impossible any falsifiing of SMTP header. The only reliable way to do it is to migrate all SMTP infrastructure to certifications. But having done that no taxes are needed: it would be easier and more efficient to stop spammers with white-lists based on trusted certificated signed by trusted CA.

Oops. Did I say trusted CA? Here is the key! In order to send the message I have to sign it. And it most likely that the key will cost money. And key holders with a bad reputation can be punished even more severe.

So, don't go to taxes: it won't work internationally, it will hurt innocent users and it won't work efficiently in USA. Instead go with CA/PKI - that the only way to make sure that Internet users can still trust each other and trus Internet itself.

Obvious

[deblau]

Editor at Financial Times encounters social problem, proposes economic solution. Did anyone else see this coming? Mod this article (-1, Overrated). Nothing to see here, folx.

what would be included?

[natefanaro]

what about IM clients, IRC, and the like? I havn't used ICQ in a while but you used to be able to send a message to an offline user and the would get it once they went online. if this were passed in to a law (I think it would have to be) what would the definition of email be? would it just be pop3, imap, and smtp servers or would there be some type of blanket clause that states "if a message waits for someone to retrieve it, it's email."

other suggestions

[MSG]

We could also make spam more expensive without changing a single bit of infrastructure by simply fixing all those damned open relays to either not listen on SMTP (in the case of old Unix boxes only running sendmail because it was the default), or to relay only for their local nets and AUTHenticated users. Suddenly spammers actually have to pay the full costs of their spam bandwidth, rather than the small fraction that they pay before they steal your bandwidth (yeah, YOU, the guy running that open relay) and force their costs on to you. You're probably not even paying enough attention to know that YOU are paying the spammers bills, you tit.

An infrastructure change is probably less likely to happen as fixing the existing hosts, for the same reason they're not fixed. There's a whole lot of admins out there that know dick about what they're doing, and are too lazy to figure it out and fix it.

If you want a client fix, how about this one: In addition to the INBOX in your mail client, you have a "New Senders" option. Your client filters mail from people you know into the INBOX (or wherever your rules have it go) and everything else ends up in a temporary location. The INBOX displays a count of new messages from people you know, the "New Users" window shows a count of new senders. You can go into the "New Users" window and see who is sending you mail and whitelist them. For mailing lists, you can also whitelist destinations. Each of these actions should be just one mouse click (or keyboard shortcut). There should be a big ass "Purge all" button for when you're done. PGP signed messages should be highlighted as likely honest new senders which should be previewed.

I'm sure someone with more time can expand that idea to better clarity, or rip it to shreds. Whichever suits you.

Except for one small problem:

[Anonymous Coward]

The US government does not "own" he internet; NSFnet is no more.

we now have spearate backbones from sprint, mci, genuity, qwest and others. Why should the government take money for that?

also, how do we deal with mailing lists: ie i send an email to it (one email) but 300 people may subscribe... do i pay tax on one email or 300 (or 301?) If i only pay tax on one letter, who pays the tax on the other 300 letters?

It is simpler to pass a law saying that advertizers must assume ALL costs of distributing their advertisements. Using other people's bandwidth without compensation would violate that. Fax spammers already obscure who they are, etc, but the FTC seems adept enough at collecting the $11k per incident from them.

More taxes == More paperwork. Great.

[LauraScudder]

Ken: Hey, have you filed your email-tax return yet this year?

Joe: No, I had to file an extension. I still need to collect all the paperwork for my mailing list deductions.

Ken: You should just hire an accountant. I hear they can get $2-3 more in returns.

Joe: Accountants are for wusses. Real men do their own taxes.

Chuck: Man, I just hope I don't get audited again this year. I lost a lot of my logs when I wiped my harddrive.

Ken: Maybe you can deduct your near-daily os-reinstalls as recreation.


I don't have to deal with beauracracies enough already, please give me more complicated government forms to file so that I can pay them $50 more each year. Woo!

And who collects this tax?

[Zlurg]

Who distributes the funds? Who prevents the old "Club of Six" from hoarding all the booty? Who turns their back while Unca Sam takes his share?

Who does this St. Matthew of the Blessed Internet answer to? And why can't I send him mail?

The term is "taxation without representation," and there are too many people with too much tea (packets) in a very big harbor (IPv4).

Oh I GET IT! OK, so migrate the willing onto the gummint-subsidized Internet-II, where this tax is a Reality(tm) and leave the Rest Of Us down on lowly Internet-I with the warning that, "Well, if you want freedom from spam, you'll come play at our house, otherwise you're just going to have to deal with it because you don't want US interfering with your Wild Wild West--oh, and BTW, we don't know how much longer Constituent Corp Dot Com is going to keep affording to keep that nasty old link up, since they keep getting sued for allowing so many hacker attacks and violations of the DMCA to perpetrate through the gateways to the 'real' Internet so if I were you I'd make a decision real quick like because we're having a $9.95 a year sale but it's only good until next Tuesday."

NO thanks

[Jesus IS the Devil]

I'd rather put up with spam ANY day of the week than to have uncle greedy sam's hand up my wallet when I'm on the internet. Why in the world does the government need to be in my mailbox, charging me for sending mail to my friends? They didn't provide the service, so they don't have the right to charge me either.

Besides, do you realize the consequences of this assinine proposal? Once you let them tax us for emails, you have already given up any/all online privacy.

You know, spam is a big problem. One that we want to get rid of. By putting the burden onto the consumer's back, all they've accomplished is to move the profits from the pockets of the spammers to the pockets of the government. All it is is a transformation of an inconvenience, from your inbox, into your wallet.

What idiot came up with this plan? He should be given a one-way ticket to the north pole.

Better money-tax idea?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about having some kind of balance attached to account, so when you send mail to some account, you have to subtract 1 cent from balance and add it to the balance of recipient. Idea behind that, that when you have normal email conversation with people, your balance will stay roughly the same, because you send email (-1 c), they reply to you (+1 c). So, the balance would not change much. But for spammers, it would cost MUCH, because not many people actually reply to them :)

But, after all, I don't like the idea of money-tax very much. What to do with a) free mailing lists? b) bounce and system messages?

My idea is just improvement over original one.

Double taxation

[Zaphod B]

In most cases, internet service provision, which includes in every case e-mail service, is already taxed at the federal and often the local level. Hence why I pay that extra $2.17 a month.

My fears.

[way2trivial]

if you create a whole new standard, designed from scratch, to make email 'responsible' that is used in duality with smtp, until such time as it's the most common, and SMTP is taken out....

with the current'philosophies' out there, there's no way the standard could be set without appeasing too many regulatory agencies into having more control/authority than I would be comfortable with.

I can't explain this well with less than 5k words
try and create a new communication standard in this paranoid USA, and it will be used as a tool for those in authority..

Re:My fears.

[Sherloqq]

• if you create a whole new standard, designed from scratch, to make email 'responsible' that is used in duality with smtp, until such time as it's the most common, and SMTP is taken out....
  
  with the current'philosophies' out there, there's no way the standard could be set without appeasing too many regulatory agencies into having more control/authority than I would be comfortable with.
  
  I can't explain this well with less than 5k words
  try and create a new communication standard in this paranoid USA, and it will be used as a tool for those in authority..

I know what you mean, but... who said it would have to be done in the USA? :) Regulatory agencies would have very little say in the protocol's design, because if the idea drummed up enough followers from around the world, there wouldn't be a single regulatory agency to talk about. And trying to get more than a handful of governments to agree on anything is... well... Awww, heck, let's start writing this up in Canada, Canadians have more than a handful of bones to pick with the US as of recently :) I'll be the first to volunteer...

And I don't think it would take all that much time to blueprint and engineer, either. We already know what things we hate about email as we see it today (and I don't mean just spam), we could come up with something in a matter of a few weeks, mebbie a couple of months at the most, planning-wise. Then we just need a few good coders who can follow instructions and have some spare time.

By the time the whole project were in version 1.0, a lot of people would be even more fed up with today's email and ready for an alternative. Take-up rate would most likely be fairly high, especially if the end users would be given a plug-n-play kind of product. A few more years, and SMTP would be ready to head to pastures like analog cell-phones and CB radios (yes, I know both are still in use today, in respectable numbers; I also know that with the advent of FSR radios, digital cell phones those numbers are declining quickly).

I dunno... I'd be optimistic about something like that, and even willing to donate some resources to the cause.

I don't want to pay.

[Anonymous Coward]

I already pay 25 euros a month to my ISP, I already download banners, pop ups and shit, I have already paid for my space of internet. If someone is too whiny to avoid using the stuff that has to be used like:

- spamassassin
http://spamassassin.org/

- internet blacklists
http://www.blackholes.us/
http://www. spamhaus.org/sbl/index.lasso

- mozilla mailer (with a nice on-the-fly filtering option)
http://www.mozilla.org

to do LARTs and tell friends, colleagues, and their trading partner NOT TO USE FUCKING ISPs that host spammers and open relays, then they can get off the internet at any time, but I will not be paying those damn 10 cents for their whiny asses.

They can pry my SMTP server from cold dead hands.

[Dark Coder]

I'd be more than willing to take another RFC regarding the closure of empty localname being restricted to in conjunction with Postmaster.

Mail From:
Rcpt to: Postmaster

That should fix it all.

A GREAT IDEA!

[ajs]

As long as there's a header that I can set to say "I will not pay the tax, please reject my mail," I'm a happy camper!

I will continue to send email to/from my friends who all run their own servers, and ISPs can go fly. If the IRS thinks that I'm going to pay them for mail that I send from my MTA to my friend's MTA that are both located in our own personal machine rooms, I'll set up UUCP mail and let them figure out if that counts....

Yeah, so sarcasm asside, this idea fits into a class that you should be looking for. Let me quote:

a tax would be an affront to some mythic libertarian "spirit of the internet"

No, a tax would be an unworkable mess that would have so many problems you cannot possibly measure them! Yes, the spirit of the Net is a network of peers who exchange packets at the IP level and let applications decide what to encapsulate, so there's some basic problems there, but then you get into What is mail? Should I tax ICMP? ICMP isn't even IP, it's a sister protocol, but if ICMP isn't charged for then I could just write SMTP/ICMP and encapsulate the protocol in ICMP datagrams (yuck, but it would work). If you tax ICMP, then you're charging me for things like my Linksys firewall rejecting network probes!

The Internet should turn into a penny post, with a levy of 1 cent per letter.

Define post. Define letter. Define pay (if I live in a community in India that's mostly barter-based and there's an email kiosk in the center of town, set up by volunteers....) Assume that the vast majority of my mail comes from a private residence and goes to private residences and businesses, not to public ISPs (which is the case) and try to figure out how we go about collecting a "tax".

I pay a tax for my connectivity, it's called ISP fees. If the US government wants to charge a tax to ISPs, they'll have to talk to the ISPs, but I assure you AOL will lobby against it pretty seriously, so you'd better have your facts in line detailing exactly how it will prevent spam from Russia while also not hurting the consumer.

Rather than punditing, I'm actually contributing to the solution. Please keep your "there oughta be a law" reactionary drivel out of my Internet.

A tax would kill e-mail

[Todd Knarr]

The only problem here is that what made e-mail so popular and useful is the same thing that caused spam to come into existence: it doesn't cost anything (once you've got an Internet connection) to send e-mail to people. Think about all the services, like the RISKS mailing list, that are run for free by volunteers and provide valuable services. Do you think those people are going to continue providing that service if it's costing them thousands of dollars a year (eg. RISKS = $.01/message x 20,000 subscribers x 80 messages a year = $16,000/year conservatively to run the list)? No, any proposal to attach costs to e-mail has to meet one precondition: if I desire a particular person to send me e-mail, it must not cost that person anything to send me e-mail.

How to beat this idea

[mnemotronic]

Think like a spammer:

1. Set up a business "A". Register with minimum number of appropriate authorities. Open business bank account with minimum amount.
2. Set up business account for "A" with ISP. Work out 30-45 day net.
3. Start spewing billions of spamessages from company "A".
4. Company "A" receives huge tax bill from ISP.
5. Don't pay it.
6. After 30 days, receive second bill.
7. Don't pay it.
8. When push comes to shove, fold company "A", declare it bankrupt.
9. Start company "B". Lather, rinse, repeat.

Hey folks, spam is a personal problem. Behind each flood of spam is a single person who decides to send out messages which annoy millions of people, and cause wasted time and excess bad karma. Multiple this by all the hundreds or thousands of spammers (people). This is not a technical, political, economic, or social issue -- it's that one person who clicks the button that launches the spambot. Make the consequences of clicking that button so personally horrific that the person will just not do it.

The only viable solution in my opinion...

[baywulf]

cryptographic (public key?) authentication of email servers. Then we would be sure of the source of any email and could block any email from unknown email servers or known spam sources.

Fuck that shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Free internet forever!!

tax break for spammers?

[EvilStein]

If they had to pay to send email, they could just write it off as a business expense. So they'd still get to spam, AND get a nice tax write off in the process.

Yeah! Great plan!

I still vote that we have hunting licenses include spammers.

In related news:

[Qbertino]

Cyanide as a way of preventing SARS.

Just say 'no'

[hesiod]

Taxes or fees on Email is a terrible idea.

What about people who run listservs? Would they be charged once to send a mail to 500 thousand others, or would they have to pay $5,000 every time they sent a mailing?

How did the Internet become the property of one government or organization? It didn't. Taxes on Email in any way bastardizes what the 'net is; even if it removes one problem, it just creates another. Plus, if the originating spam server is out of the country, or untraceable, the tax does nothing but cost honest people money.

I think Spam is one of those problems that will eventually run its course and become a non-issue. After enough ISPs and gateways put in good enough Spam protection and actually follow through on their claims to not harbor spammers, it will no longer make money and disappear. I'm not claiming it will happen in the next year or 3, but it might.

A Better way...

[Dr_Ish]

Hi there, To echo alot of other people, it seems that this proposal would be technically hard to implement and have a very nasty effect upon mailing lists and other totally valid and useful services. Thus, it is not a good idea. Indeed, the fact that the folks at Microsoft are investigating the idea, under the name of the Penny Black project, also provides reasons to be suspicious of the idea.

There is another way to combat spam. That is to stop it making financial sense for the spammers. Basically, spam is a numbers game. Provided a tiny fraction of people actually respond to each offer of an enlarged Nigerian toner cartidge, the spammers continue to make money. One way to reverse the economics though would be to increase the supply side costs. Suppose 1% of the readership of slashdot were to, every day, contact a spam company, asking for their services (although never really using them of course), then the spammers would have to spend alot more time, effort and money figuring out who really wants their services and who is just there yanking their chain. This would increase costs and thus make spamming a less financially rewarding activity. After all, there is more than one use of a hotmail account! What do you all think? Ish

exactly

[gl4ss]

exactly, a solution made by people who don't understand the problem, to tax the emails the protocol would have to be radically changed and that would be enough to stop most of the spam on it's own!

Thought it was a forgery; it's just a troll.

[karlandtanya]

First, let me say that I read the article and did a whois of the domain to make sure it wasn't a forgery. Nope; looks like "the" Financial Times of London to me. I thought they were a respectable publication.

This is just some Brit trying to troll the Yanks:

"American voters will either get commercial regulation of spam by the next election or they will insist on moral regulation. The logic of America's war on drugs will take over. Rival political candidates will engage in a sort of auction, solemnly bidding up the criminal penalties they deem appropriate. "

If I format the Whois info legibly, the lameness filter kicks it for lines too short. Look it up yourself or just deal with it.

WHOIS Record for ft.com
Registrant: THE FINANCIAL TIMES LIMITED (FT2-DOM)

Number One Southwark Bridge, London, UK; Domain Name: FT.COM Administrative Contact: The Financial Times Limited (CS2810-ORG)company.secretary@FT.COM The Financial Times Limited Number One Southwark Bridge, London, GB (+44)20-7873(3000) fax: - (+44)873(3928) Technical Contact: Support, FT (CNKMTQXQSO)ftepops@FT.COM The Financial Times Ltd Number One Southwark Bridge, London, UK +44 20 7873 3000 Record expires on 29-Nov-2005. Record created on 30-Nov-1994. Database last updated on 5-May-2003 11:41:32 EDT. Domain servers in listed order: NS.DIGISLE.NET 167.216.193.232 NS1.DIGISLE.NET 167.216.250.42

Why Bother

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a lot of unused bandwidth. Why worry about taxing emails? No one is going to pay and there are better ways of fighting spam

Re:Create a new medium, don't try to fix the old o

[mr3038]

a better idea, compared to imposing taxes on email, would be to create a new infrastructure for exchanging of "email"

The problem, as I see it, isn't the protocol per se, but the fact that we trust in every step on the path from the sender to receiver. You can already enforce a rule to receive only mail signed with a key verified by VeriSign (or some other expensive CA). Because the key is expensive and contains some information about the sender one could easily block all the senders one doesn't want to hear about. And the spammer needs to be able to supply fake ID to a CA you trust to fake his sender information after you've blocked him once. In addition, digitally signing all messages requires much more computing power so sending enormous amounts of spam would be more expensive in that way too.

The "received" headers in mail would be enough to trace spammers even today if one could trust in those. And the reason we cannot trust in those is that some ISPs are run by spammers and they forge "received" headers in otherwise legimate mail servers (the worst case, usually spammers just find open relays). If you trust in ISPs in general, you're trusting spammers too.

The problem isn't how we can make the thing work but how we can make it work without speding more than we do today (that is, practically nothing).

Forced upgrades?

[taernim]

How would this change the current state of affairs? A big part of the spam problem seems to currently be Asian computers which have not been properly upgraded are used to forward forged emails on to their intended targets. So how will this tax change things? Not only will spammers still send email out, but now the people whose address they fake will be charged for it? If you intend on charging based on who sends it, then good luck. That falls into the whole International Law thing. If you cannot force the people to upgrade now, it seems unlikely you'll be able to enforce this in areas we do not have jurisdiction.

Maintain and Expand Bandwidth?

[drinkypoo]

For who? Certainly not for me. The internet is now a private entity, the government provides little or no maintenance. It provides litigation, but litigation is part of the problem, not the solution. We should be solving spam technically, not legally.

Hence, the solution is to charge a micropayment deposit (note: Waiting for useful micropayment technology) for each email sent to an address. The reader is left with the option to keep the payment, or not. The reader may specify any amount for the payment, perhaps on a sliding scale, so that when they get more mail, the cost to send them mail goes up... but again that's all up to the user.

If the government IS going to start taxing email, they need to only tax commercial email. Otherwise they create a whole bunch of infrastructure problems for people who don't want them without really giving them anything. Spammers make enough money to go ahead and pay a one cent tax on email, they'll just spend more time verifying addresses before they spam.

Small companies and bills in the hundreds...

[Roogna]

How does he figure this isn't that much money? As someone who is running a small company, I already pay in the hundreds for what amounts to e-mail. That is, we have our co-lo fees and each employee has i-net access at home. Now why should we pay a penny an e-mail for company communications? Both to fellow employees or to customers? Oh believe me I'd love to see spammers get hit up the wahzoo just as much as the next guy, but why does this suggestion keep coming up as a way. A couple hundred extra a month can literally drive a lot of small companies out of business.

Besides, as spammers have shown, it's not likely to drive them out of business anyway. They'll simply find a workaround of sending so they avoid being traced by the 'tax' servers. Instead of going to the technical effort to implement e-mail 'tax' servers and if the goverment is so eager to help. How about a law that says we as individuals can sue companies running open-relays if we receive spam through that relay.

Yeah, now that one might shut those down real fast...

F That...

[DraKKon]

I don't send spam, at all, but I'd rather GET the spam than pay for email... spam is getting easier to filter out anyway.. spamassassin, razor, dcc, pyzor etc...

Email delivery to email fetch

[Bruha]

Why not change to a fetch method instead of a delivery method. The Qmail author has some sort of writeup on it though I wouldnt do it justice to write about it right now since it's been a few months since reading it.

Unintended Consequences...

[sfbanutt]

How would something like this be collected? Monitoring port 25? All something like this would do is drive traffic off of public protocols and onto proprietary ones. Instead of paying an email tax, business will set up proprietary links (exchange server, anybody?) Sure, it kinda sounds like a good idea, but you've got to watch out for those unintended consequences.

MOD PARENT UP

[neitzsche]

I agree - their 'solution' can't really work. It does not address the growing problem of spammers hijacking legitimate user's accounts. I think authenticating senders would help. I also think severe punishment for current spammers is needed. Getting caught buying a T-3 and using it as a spam server should have the death penalty.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[GreyPoopon]

Getting caught buying a T-3 and using it as a spam server should have the death penalty.

A public hanging would help ensure that many children would not grow up to be spammers....

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

you might want to let costco know about that penalty, they just added 2 more ds3s, and spam like hell through them

ugh

[jasno]

First off, if you start off charging a penny, in 10 years it will be a nickle. Then a dime. If politicians see a framework in place to extract money from something as irresistable as email they'll be all over it as a new an exciting way to relieve us of our money.

Secondly, the day email becomes taxed is the day a army of geeks materializes with the sole purpose of replacing the current email system with something else. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The Thin End Of The Wedge

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck paying ANYTHING for email. Sure, first it's a penny then suddenly it's a nickel or a dime or a friggin quarter just to send a fucking email. This is a stupid plan and I hope it NEVER gets implemented!

Re:Taxes have MORE THAN one prupose

[Famatra]

What you said is wrong: taxes do not have '1' purpose: to generate revenue. Taxes also allow a marginal social cost (like pollution, health effects of smoking etc.) to be incorporated into the price of a good. This 'internalization of an externality' though tax is called a Pigouvian tax, or corrective tax. The tax is not suppose to reduce the smoking etc. to zero. It merely raises the cost of using the good to reflect the marginal damage done. Why is this good? The overall benefit of society is raised, as those who consume a good now pay the full costs (to health care as in smoking, or pollution) of consuming it. The quantity of a consuming the bad good is thus reduced to the point where the benefits = the costs, (never to zero). Economists use this same idea to reduce the social cost of monopolists by taxing their profits. In conclusion taxes are a powerful fiscal tool with many uses (revenue, reducing the social cost, correcting for monopolist behaviour, and more). Famatra

cause criminals never break the law

[Sabalon]

So someone comes around and fucks up the internet with spam, so I now have to pay to do what was free just to stop the bad guys?

What's next...next time a problem comes up, instead of solving it, they just make honest people pay to be honest.

And criminals by their nature don't care about laws, and will continue to get away with it. Just like all those drug laws have stopped the flow of cocaine.

Re:Taxes have MORE THEN one prupose

[Famatra]

What you said is wrong: taxes do not have '1' purpose: to generate revenue. Taxes also allow a marginal social cost (like pollution, health effects of smoking etc.) to be incorporated into the price of a good. This 'internalization of an externality' though tax is called a Pigouvian tax, or corrective tax.

The tax is <b>not</b> suppose to reduce the smoking etc. to zero. It merely raises the cost of using the good to reflect the marginal damage done.

Why is this good? The overall benefit of society is raised, as those who consume a good now pay the full costs (to health care as in smoking, or pollution) of consuming it. The quantity of a consuming the bad good is thus reduced to the point where the benefits = the costs, (never to zero).

Economists use this same idea to reduce the social cost of monopolists by taxing their profits.

In conclusion taxes are a powerful fiscal tool with many uses (revenue, reducing the social cost, correcting for monopolist behaviour, and more).

(The other message didnt format right because I put it as html >:) )

How could this work?

[42forty-two42]

How does the government expect to track *all* email? The support isn't in the underlying protocols, and nobody wants to throw away 20+ years of developing email servers just because the government wants a cut. And what about local email? I get emails from my crond daily - would those get taxed, too?

Tax on email

[yy1]

This is the stupidist idea I've heard in a long time, it shows how US-Centric people think, do these people realize that the internet is INTERNATIONAL!?

How can you impose this type of tax? The spammers would just move offshore and you would just be curbing the usefulness of e-mail for simple things like say, Slashdot notification that someone replied to this rant.

The best the FTC could do is impose a standard of email on the government that would authenticate the sender in some way that would be open to use by all, and set the example of a spam free email system that people/isp's could implement themselves.

Legislating this, then using the weight of the US to bully the rest of the world into it will never work.

Goofy thought process

[Geekbot]

I always thought this was one of the goofiest ideas ever for a whole bunch of reasons.
1. Freedom - You are giving up anonymous email communications. Fine, you say you will use another system if you want to be anonymous, such as an instant messenger, but if everyone uses that, then the problem will just shift to IM instead of email.
2.How do you track it? We all have to indentify ourselves with an email? If tax-exempt under a certain limit, why not register 5000 different email addresses.
3.Forged info. Headers are already forged, do you want to be pay as someone else uses your email address through forging or maybe a trojan on your system?
4.Overseas. This is coming from overseas markets already that are shifty, why on earth would they pay us a tax.

Overall, I think this solution ignores the obvious problems, SPAM is fraud 99% of the time, it is a fraudulent identity, fraudulent marketing, fraudulent at every level. It is already illegal most of the time and you aren't going to get people to behave more honestly when you tell them to start paying tax on top of showing ethics they already don't have. If a new email system replacing smtp and pop3 was put into place to enable tracking of emails for taxing purposes, then you've already eliminated 99% of spam by making the spammers identifiable. In which case, why do we need a tax if we had a new system that could reliably identify senders for tax purposes, as we would then know who was actually sending the spam and could attack them personally through lawsuits and criminal cases. Sounds like a really messed up way to solve a problem by charging the victims if this would even work at all, which is unlikely.

Typical fat first world thinking - screw the poor

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, another tax and, even better, a precedent setting international tax. I'm sure starving people won't mind paying a little bit.

FM, like we need more involuntary taxation at any level ever, but to even consider taxing basic intercommunication is frightenly stupid in the long term. Why stife the very factor that fuels development and growth? Like I said, this type of irresposible thinking is so typical of fat overpaid underworked first-worlders.

It's unbelievable how injust business has become. Everything is about generating excessive incomes and there is nothing about quality of lives.

If there were exceptions

[ResQuad]

If you could make exceptions, like as a reciver, I would want all aproved senders not to be charged. So I could aprove all my friends and they wouldnt be taxed when they email me (or companies that I like for that matter).

Otherwise I think email should be taxed, but the question is where should the money go?

One way to start it:

[Dare nMc]

I think the post office should start allowing cheap, maybe $.10 electric postcards. Just put a postcard scanner, and printer at every post office. you pay $.10 to send it, the post office scans it, and re-prints wherever is most convienient. PO box's could be refitted to require no human content. They then give bulk mail people a reduced rate, by giving everyone a email address that costs the $.10 to send, and they print to anyone who hasn't setup a email address. The post office would then pay you half the postage (some %), to supply a real email address to get the messages directly.

soon we all use are federal supplied email address for home coresponance, and the best part is, fraud using this email address is treated the same as mail fraud, a federal crime.

This is just stupid

[iamdrscience]

If you tax e-mails then somebody will make up a new protocol and people will begin to use that, if that new protocol becomes taxed then another new one will pop up, etcetra, etcetra, ad infinitum.

The only way this could work out would be to tax all communication over the internet which I don't think I need to tell you wouldn't work, it'd be like a tax on speaking, just wouldn't work. Furthermore, for it to actually be effective against spammmers the tax per packet or whatever would have to be high enough that it would kill the downloading of any large files.

IGNORING ALL OF THAT there's still the problem of enforcement -- it's somewhere between ridiculously difficult and impossible. Either way spam would still get through.

People who don't understand the internet shouldn't be making laws regulating its use.

Re:Taxation- more figures

[bryanthompson]

Here and here are some really good statistics on who pays what taxes.

Tax to avoid spam

[Ace905]

No thanks, I think I'd rather receive the Spam.

-Doug

Tax isn't the answer!

[tc3driver]

I will be damed if I am gonna let an already too powerful government start to tax my free e-mail, I guess I don't understand what the problem is with spam, inst that why you have a delete button, and I don't want to hear "But think about the children," we live in a prudish society anyways, where sex is a dirty nasty thing, and as some of you may think this is going off topic it is actually very on topic, if it weren't for the porn sites lobbying for "fresh meat" this whole spam thing wouldn't even be a subject to talk about. I will say this though, if we put as much thought and effort toward sexual education, there wouldn't be as much need for porn, and thus less spam, as usual EDUCATION IS THE ANSWER!

Just Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then we'll never get rid of spam, because it would be in the government's interest to keep it around to fund things(ie: smoking, alcohol, etc...).

Views on email

[Daimaou]

I view email the same as I view verbal communication. It is just a medium that one can use to express and share ideas.

As I live my life, there are many times when somebody strikes up a conversation with me regarding things that I am not interested in hearing (most particularly Amway or some other MLM scheme). My options are to excuse myself and leave, tell them to bugger off, or to humor them by hiding my apathy and pretending to listen. Whichever way I choose to deal with the situation, the information is most often disregarded and forgotten within minutes.

It is the same with email. People are going send you email offers to lengthen your iPud via an online college degree in computer science, or offer you low-cost information on how to make money working from home selling goldfish polishing kits. Your options are the same as they are with verbal communication.

Personally, I ignore spam; although I imagine enough of the world listens or those who send it wouldn't bother. If you are like me and have adopted an across-the-board ignore policy, there are several good programs available to automate the ignore process for you so it is not that big a deal.

I cannot disagree enough with the idea of an email tax. It is artificial and benefits nobody but the government. I personally view this idea with the same level of incredulity I would if the government tried to tax verbal communication because some people want to talk incessantly about Amway. It is absolutely ludicrous.

In fact, even if you totally disregard email coming from other countries outside the US, evidence that an email tax would not stop spam is more than apparent in the mail delivered to your mailbox on a daily basis. How much of it is spam; or rather junk mail? For me, it is usually one piece of legitimate mail per five pieces of junk mail, which is about the same ratio I see in my email inbox. The only difference between electronic junk mail and tangible junk mail is that the senders have to pay to send the latter.

No, the only one's benefiting from an email tax would be the bureaucracy that instigated it. The only thing that would change would be the addition of a bunch of government piranhas viciously snapping at every penny they could get. It is a very dumb and poorly conceived idea, in my opinion.

Re:Create a new medium, don't try to fix the old o

[Sherloqq]

• The problem, as I see it, isn't the protocol per se, but the fact that we trust in every step on the path from the sender to receiver.

I agree with the fact that too much trust is the primary reason why email is plagued with problems. The Verisign way you describe sounds like what I'm talking about, although I don't know about the specific implementation details (could you provide me with a link or two where I could read up more?)

However, I do not agree with the very last sentence. While for you the cost of maintaining your email systems might be practically nothing, it's different for people like me, who have millions of emails (a lot of them spam) flowing through their networks. If you add up the cost of maintaining hardware, providing network bandwidth, and all the man-hours spent (essentially wasted) on trying to combat spam, the cost is nowhere near nothing. I'm pretty sure that the total cost of that plus "making what we have" work (excuse my paraphrase) would be much higher (in my case) than development of a parallel, more secure architecture, which not only would not incur the email tax (after all, it would be a different, incompatible protocol that just happens to be duplicating SMTP), but one that would quickly pay for itself once resold to customers, current and future. So (in my case) the new and better way would most likely be cheaper, easier and more lucrative to follow than stitching holes and maintaining a thousand and one patches to SMTP.

Don't you ever get so tired of the old and broken things that you just start anew?li

I still continue to be amazed by the amount...

[Peterus7]

of effort people give to online spam, when their post boxes are clogged with junk mail as well.

Spam tends to be a bit more in your face and vulgar though...

Again and Again

[rudy_wayne]

The (stupid and unworkable) idea of taxing e-mail in order to stop Spam has been proposed a zillion times, but still remains stupid and unworkable. There are so many things wrong with this idea it's hard to know where to start, but I guess the most fundamental flaw is that making people pay a penny per e-mail would require the ability to properly identify the sender of each and every e-mail. If that was possible, we would have stopped the Spammers already and no tax would be needed.

Postage hasn't stopped Junk Mail

[nsomnac]

Infidels! Hasn't anyone learned that taxes are not a solution to everything?

How many of you get junk snail-mail still? And each one of those mailers costs the sender at least 10 cents or more to send and at least a couple of cents for printing and such.

So if the snail-mail spam hasn't stopped, what makes you think a penny tax for sending email is going to stop the spammer?

PITA

[nmos]

Ok so the Feds create an email tax, the states see that it's ok and want to get in on the action, then counties and cities want their cut and since an email may travel over many hundreds of cities/counties/states they all feel justified adding their own tax. The cost of just complying could easily outstrip the actual tax. I know most people just love any tax that they think targets someone else but people just need to say no to internet taxes.

No problem has ever been solved by taxes

[kwiqsilver]

And no problem has ever been solved by giving power to a government entity. We complain about them being inept, slow, inefficient, and bureaucratic for a reason.
An excellent similar idea that I saw in the book Earthweb (a pretty good read) was paying the recipient for his time.
A character had his email account set up (and it would take something more than our current email protocols to handle it) so that people on his allow list could send him email for free. He could also put people on a list requiring them to pay a given amount of money to send him an email. And anybody else got his default amount.
If a stranger had a legitimate reason to email him (like a job offer), he could refund the money. Not that it really matters if the employer is sending three $0.25 emails to candidates. But if a spammer had to pay a quarter per email, they'd go back to junk snail mail.

Re:Taxation- more figures

[ponxx]

> [...] rushlimaugh.com [...]
>shouldn't it be \. so the slash leans to the left like most of the readers?

If you think Rush limbaugh is centre ground then i really hope most /. readers are leaning left from your perspective..

> good statistics on who pays what taxes
a) those figures are a from the IRS, and thus take into account taxable income only, the main argument by "the left" is that these people avoid paying taxes, usually by reducing their "taxable income" by more or less legal schemes.

b) social justice is not just to do with the tax system. While it is accepted that some differential in pay is necessary to encourage economic activity, the disparity between rich and poor has grown completely out of proportion in the US. Go back to Limbaugh's website, and see what he has to say about income. (pointer: top 1% get on avg. ~70x as much as bottom half!)

And again, this is just the taxable income declared to the IRS, not including, for example., capital gains that have not been realised yet.

I don't give a fuck *who* gets to be a millionare

[autopr0n]

Anti-Spam zealots like those at spamhaus have already proven that it's possible to track down spammers without being evil. And anyway, I don't give a fuck who gets rich as long as the Spam stops. What this guy is saying is that I should pay money out of my own pocket to insure that people the author deems 'unscrupulous' don't get rich! How idiotic!

The restrictions on email imposed by such a taxation scheme would be far more then to total amount of restrictions needed to stop Spam. The government would need to register each and every mail server. Try to run your own mail server, and you could end up in the can for tax-evasion. All email server software would need to be modified to report usage statistics to the government.

And of course, it wouldn't do a damn thing to stop international spamming, either, but it would do a lot to silence a lot of legitimate mass emailings from Americans. Things like receipts for online purchases, or software-development mailing lists.

At least most people who think email should be charged for want to see it implemented on a voluntary basis. As in, "if you want to email me, you need to pay me". Not, "everyone needs to pay the government if they want to send an email."

Finally, I think Lessig's Bounty would really help cut down on spam, but the real solution lies in refactoring the email protocol itself to prevent a lot of the abuses. One of my favorite solutions is the 'sender-verification' system. In my vision for it, whenever you got an email for the first time from someone you didn't know, they would get a bounce message with instructions for adding themselves to a 'trusted address'. This would insure that at least the reply-to address was real. If spammers started using bots to respond, we could do things like the 'what's this a picture of' type reverse Turing tests you see sometimes on the web. We could also throw in PGP type signing to prevent spammers from hijacking address used by sites like Amazon or other people who send out large amounts of legitimate, automated, email (for sites like this, the user would need to manually add the address)

If we take Spam to mean 'unrequested automated emails' then such a system would stop all Spam, 100% and the only false positives would be from people who couldn't be bothered to include the correct return address or didn't see the request for verification.

An Alternative

[nbahi15]

I've been thinking that signing email would be the best way to get rid of spam.

A group of companies and individual need to organize, maybe as an IETF group, to work out an email requirement of signing email with certificates. You can even set some dates, like email must be signed starting X day to receive priority treatment, otherwise it gets handled second class. Some point in the future you might even set a date to stop accepting unsigned email.

So at this point, if handled correctly, you could at least be assured that the sender of received email is verifiable. You can still receive your unsigned mail but in a second-class inbox.

I really think this idea could work to limit the appeal of mass spamming. What do you think?

wrong answer

[josepha48]

This is the wrong answer.

Much of the spam that I get is from overseas asian countries. How do you collect tax from them?

Also what happens to people and companies that do telecommuting where many of their employess communicate using email? I have had conversations with some of the people that I work with through email and have exchanged 100+ email in a day on the same subject. While I would prefer them to come into the office, I know they like being able to work at home.

Taxing email is NOT the solution. People will end up paying tax on email they did not send.

The solution is to change the email protocol to include something like PGP signatures. Something that cannot be faked (real tought). Then I go to my ISP and let them know what sigs to allow when I set up my account. Then they ONLY allow email into their system that matches the signatures.

Well I admit spam is pretty bad and I have given up my inbox to the spamers. My new approach of using email filters is to move mail from people I know to another folder has worked much better. Now I just need mozilla to recognize case insensitive email addresses. 'Sender' 'is in my address book ' move to 'new folder' works really well. Then a quick glance at my inbox to see if there is anything from anyone I know. Then select all / delete....

Re:wrong answer

[Nihilanth]

although this may be a messy solution, those emails cross onto a US server at -some point- in between them and you, so why not filter out from there unless a tax has been paid to the gateway? i dunno if this is technically feasible or not, but the internet is a web, not a cloud, and there are a finite number of wires through which spam can travel into this country from another one.

Re:wrong answer

[josepha48]

This web is an old web and to do what you suggest is like guarding the borders of the US, and even then stuff gets through.

Coming soon: Spam from China

[Anonymous Coward]

If they start taxing emails, what will prevent the spammers from just moving their spam sending facilities offshore? Where US tax laws no longer apply. This idea seems like it will not be practical.

Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is disgusting. At home, because ISPs provide such low-quality services and I can do-it-myself, I pay for premium bandwidth and run my own mail server @ home.

Some of the idiocrats need to consider that ISPs are only a subset of what and who provides Internet service to the world.

I'm not going to shut down my e-mail server because 200 or less people decided to use the Internet as their own fraudulent marketing engine. To hell with that.

We have laws to go after scamsters - seize their assets, both monetary and technological, and watch some very scared inconsiderate idiots like Wallace find something else to do.

Re:Taxation- more figures

[Aexia]

And like most conservatives, Rush only focuses on one part of the tax puzzle when weeping for the troubles the rich encounter and how the poor are such lucky duckies for paying "so little" in taxes.

As long as you ignore payroll taxes and various state taxes. At the state level, the poor generally end up paying a *greater* portion of their income compared to the rich.

The percent of wealth controlled by the upper ten percent has more than double in the past 20 years. I really don't think they need any help.

Not really.

[autopr0n]

Look what it did for the airlines. At first everyone complained because if you got on a plane you had to sit next to people that previously could only afford to go greyhound.

Unless you live in a state with a smaller population. Then you have to pay way, way more.

Re:Not really.

[j-pimp]

Yeah but it has to be just affordable enough that it makes it less than trivial for someone to come in as the discount airliner for low population areas. There are a few problems with lazifaire capitalism, but I'd rather have to deal with fighting the opression of a few than living with the opression of all. Also were talking plane tickets and the prices ar high simply due to lack of demand and competition. There is no great conspiracry to repress people in low population states.

FSCKING STUPID

[tacocat]

Who's going to really end up paying for this?

It won't be the spammers. That's for sure.

Look at the history of business. ALL regulatory expenses have always ended up in the laps of the purchasers. It means you will be paying more for everything you purchase on the internet, even if all they do is send you a confirmation email.

And the companies will charge you a hell of a lot more than one penny. Theres tracking financials, resource loads, personell expenses...

You might be closer if they charged you an extra dollar for each item purchased. And would this stop spam. Not a chance. Why?

• Spammers don't pay overseas taxes
• Spammers don't have traceable address
• Spammers back-charge to their customers, which means you end up paying another dollar for each order of Viagra

This won't even show up on their radar. They will just pass along any expenses that they can't hide from.

Spam is popular with Marketing types because it's a really cheap method of getting the message out. If you make it more expensive for them to get the message out, they will simply charge more in the end. Think about it. How much of the money you spend on a bottle of 12oz. of water is a direct manufacturing cost and how much is marketing expenses. Water is cheap. Why do I pay $1.99 for it? Marketing.

Same thing is going to happen with Spam

And you can bet your butt that you friendly local ISP is going to love this idea because they will charge you at least 2 cents for every email.

Swallowing the spider to catch the fly...

[tgibbs]

I'd rather deal with filtering out spam than have a tax on internet usage. Sure, a penny sounds reasonable. But the true cost is in establishing the principle that the government is entitled to collect revenue from routine internet usage. How long before the internet tax becomes a key element in funding every politician's favorite pork-barrel project? After all, two pennies is pretty reasonable, too. And three pennies isn't really so bad, and....

Lets stop being stupid about this shall we?

[Marrow]

What we need is for the ISPs to take some leadership on this issue and either enhance the current SMTP protocol or replace it and use a ISP-ISP protocol between themselves. The protocol should include a lot more information regarding who sent the email and if some sender becomes a problem, then that sender is blacklisted. If the sending ISP is non-compliant, then the entire ISP is blacklisted until they comply. If the sender
or the ISP cannot conduct business, then they will mend their ways or THEIR customers will leave them. Their customers will remove the money from the spammers pockets. That is the right way to do it.

The tax idea is stupid on the face of it. It deserves no discussion. Lets just fix the problem.

I don't think so

[codeguy007]

What about legitmate mailing-lists and news letters?
I used to working in the field and I know their are legitmate services emailing in excess of a million emails a day even tens of Millions. They can't afford a levy of that size. No solution works a hundred percent but their are some very good spam solutions out there such as spamassassin or evsmail.

evsmail

Re:I don't think so

[Nihilanth]

it should be fairly simple to add an exception for "non commercial", with heavy fines attached for an excempted user sending the wrong kinds of email.

Re:I don't think so

[codeguy007]

even commerical companies can't afford this. CBS Market Watch sends out 10 Million Emails a day and they are legitimate. Can they afford to pay someone $100,000 US on top of their bandwidth costs?

Re:Taxation- more figures

[bryanthompson]

>The percent of wealth controlled by the upper ten percent has more than double in the past 20 years. I really don't think they need any help.

So... they're successful. What's the problem there? Why punish people who are successful, it doesn't make sense. The fact that most of the 10 percent own businesses probably makes them even more evil. Yep, they're evil for providing jobs and goods.

The tax system is screwed up in general. The only fair way to do it (in my opinion) is to take the total amount of money it takes to run the government, and divide it equally among the entire population.

Are You People Insane?

[Anonymous Coward]

Taxation is the worst possible attempt to solve any problem! Why in God's name would anybody do this? The tax system is allready many times more of a problem than spam ever will be.

I prefer SPAM over taxes!

[rleibman]

Man this is SOOOO ungood! Receiving spam is just a (big) annoyance, but it really costs me nothing (and with spamassassin even less). Why would I want to pay yet another tax (as if 60% of my money, if you take sales, gas, car, property taxes, etc., wasn't enough).
I am now very glad that SMTP makes it hard to track spammers, it is this nature that may be the only thing keeping our congresscritters grabby hands off our emails.

Looking at it this way: LONG LIVE SPAM!

Re:Taxation- more figures

[Some Dumbass...]

So... they're successful. What's the problem there? Why punish people who are successful, it doesn't make sense.

Progressive taxation doesn't punish the successful, it gives a break to the less fortunate. Even those people who argue for flat taxes admit that below a certain income level, nobody should pay any (federal) tax. People with little or no income need every penny, and those with some but not a lot (40K?) still need something of a break. You can argue about the details, but that's the point of progressive taxation -- to help out the poor.

Is taxation best?

[harriet nyborg]

spoken like a whining liberal.

now no one has to take the idea seriously.

and we can get back to CUTTING taxes to create jobs and prosperity for the top 1% of spammers.

any more talk about taxes, and we'll pull out the anti-gun epithets and silence you with those.

read my lips

[kguilber]

You know that once the government mandated a 1-cent tax on e-mails that soon the tax would become 2 cents and then 10 cents. I think it is a pretty good idea, but since I don't trust the government much, I have a feeling it has the potential to kill the appeal of e-mail as a means of low-cost communication.

Why not just limit it at the server?

[evil_pb]

Open relay problems aside, why not just limit the amount of mail a server will allow to be sent in a set period of time by a user?

Imagine what would happen if the most popular mail server applications (i.e. Sendmail, Postfix, Exchange, Groupwise, etc) simply all agreed to implement a throttle control into their code. Allow it to be configurable, where something like an email list can send as much as it needs (trusted accounts), but untrusted accounts are limited to maybe 100 or 200 emails an hour. Spammers work by sending emails in the thousands or millions, as fast as they can. Ignore the from: header since it can be forged ... track them by IP address. It would be very hard for someone to come up with a new IP address every couple hundred emails and re-establish the connection to the server from a time perspective.

I think eventually the spammers would have nowhere else to go; if a version of sendmail came out with this feature, I would install it in a second, even though I'm not an open relay. Legitimate users cause these problems too.

I would even go so far as to say the ISP's need to take some action here, if it's really such a problem for their precious bandwidth. Monitor the SMTP volume coming through their network - set limits. Test their client systems periodically for open relays, block or severely limit the ones who do not comply after giving them time to work it out. A lot of admins, sadly, simply do not know better, or are very lazy until prodded. Tell them their server won't pass traffic until the relay is closed and watch them comply real quick. If it's a signed user agreement, they can't do much about it.

I require this of my Co-Lo customers; if they have a server, I *require* them to keep it patched, email relays closed, etc. I do check from time to time, and it's in their agreement with me that I reserve the right to disable any access to their server I deem necessary to preserve the integrity of the rest of the network. Not a single one has complained about that, and in fact all were pleasantly surprised to see a provider take such a pro-active approach to service integrity. Is it more overhead for me? I have found that it may seem like it initially, however by enforcing this it is actually less work than dealing with constant cleanup. Think about it. It's a shift in the paradigm of "customer can do no wrong", to "customer sometimes just needs to be shown the way".

Just adding a throttle control to email servers... That's all it would take. Just getting providers to tell their customers to stop causing the problems, is all it would take. Doesn't this seem like a hell of a lot less work than taxing email or any of the other mess of solutions presented?

Re:Create a new medium, don't try to fix the old o

[Pig Hogger]

IMHO, a better idea, compared to imposing taxes on email, would be to create a new infrastructure for exchanging of "email", where things like forged headers, open relays and spammers would be a thing of the past.

I've seen, on news.admin.net-abuse.email (just can't find the posting itself - will the actual author will stand up?) a proposal where e-mail could simply consist of a delivery notice being sent, whereas the actual e-mail itself would be held on the sender's server itself, until the recipient decides to get the message.

This way, the sender will pay the actual cost of sending proportionnaly to his volume, and since the identification of the sender's server could imply a traceable protocol of some sort with regards to the sender's identification, spammers could no longer use guerilla hit-and-run approaches to send their shit.

This way, you only retrieve the mail you want.

And if you refuse mail from someone, your e-mail client could answer back the sender by telling him to shove his message up his database...

Why tax? Just send the $.01 to the recipient.

[sdpinpdx]

Besides the fact that the guy's smoking dope and taxing a global network is impossible, there's no reason to give the "postage" to any government. Just give the penny (dime, whatever) to the email recipient.

If they're regular correspondent, it'll net out. Maybe your mailer gives the penny back to people you want to hear from (mailing lists) if they do most of the talking. My mailer would certainly bank the penny in each SPAM. If a message doesn't have a penny, you quarantine it like your SPAM filter does now. Of course, whitelists continue to work like they do now to exempt mailing lists, your mom, etc. from the fee to get past your filter.

This doesn't solve the SPAM problem from the ISP's point of view (at least not immediately), but if widely adopted could at least make it expensive for SPAMmers to get their message through.

This is, without a doubt,

[MasTRE]

the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Let's tax the air we breathe while at it.

Not with pump-and-dump stock

[Anonymous Coward]

The product is stock, but there's no connection between the stock and the spammer.

email tax is bad, mmmkay?

[Dossy]

Making spam legal by levying a tax on email will only make things worse. We'll get more spam, and since the taxes for it have been paid by the spam-sender, we can't even complain about it.

Duh.

-- Dossy

Can You Tax?

[suwain_2]

Most of the Internet is 'private.' That is, most of the networks my data travels through are owned by companies, not the government. In connecting to Slashdot, my data goes through Adelphia, MetroFiber Networks, AboveNet, and then to C&W (where Slashdot is housed).

To better illustrate... Take the cliche of "the information superhighway." Except it's not a state-, or even federal-, owned highway. It's a bunch of companies that built big roads on their private property. The companies owning the roads sometimes 'peer' with other companies' roads, allowing people to seamlessly move from one road to another. You can also buy a 'driveway,' or even a private street, from a company. (Representing your Internet connection.) The government doesn't own any of the roads.

Now the government wants to put tollbooths on the roads, and collect a toll from anyone driving on the roads. I really can't see how this idea can possibly be legal.

In addition, I've always felt that it's difficult to define the Internet. It's not too hard to say that when I'm posting to Slashdot, I'm using the Internet. But suppose I use an internal mail server to send mail to someone else using the same mailserver. It never leaves the internal LAN. Am I using the Internet?

Now suppose the mailserver is outside my firewall. Am I on the Internet? What if I have my routing messed up and it goes out the T1 and comes back in, going a single hop to my ISP. Am I using the Internet yet?

Suppose, as is actually the case, my mail server is several states away. If I send mail to someone else on it, am I subject to the tax? But it's a shared server; if I send mail to someone else who hosts there, but isn't related to my site, do I get taxed?

Suppose I VPN into the server. Although some of the data goes over the Internet, my e-mail program 'thinks' it's on the local LAN. Am I taxed?

And what if I own a small ISP with multiple data centers. If I send mail from my house to my local data center, which is sent over a WAN to another data center I / my company owns in another state, is it the Internet?

My goal isn't to name every possible way of getting mail from one place to another. Rather, I'm trying to illustrate the ambiguity of exactly when something's on the Internet versus a private network, when most of the Internet _is_ a private network. But even if exact conditions could be drawn, I still this is _horribly_ flawed because it's a private network. (ie, my "road" analogy)

In addition to the conceptual problems, it has a few serious flaws in practice as well. First, how will they know? Will every mailserver in the country start sending reports to the IRS on who is sending mail?

A second flaw is that e-mail isn't always e-mail, if that makes any sense. If I send mail from Hotmail, and you receive it at Yahoo, neither of us have directly used anything but HTTP. It's not my 'fault' that it got sent over SMTP.

And thirdly, I get a lot of mail that wouldn't be sent if it wasn't free. I'm on nearly a dozen mailing lists; is the mailserver going to be billed for every copy it sends out? Poor bugtraq! I also get mail anytime one of my comments here is replied to, or moderated. Countless other forums I visit do the same. I'm sure that none of these places would continue mailing helpful things like this if they had to pay.

Oh, and there's another little issue... It probably won't be too effective against the spammers. Since many of them already bounce mail through open relays, forging headers, they're probably not going to pay a cent. Sure, after getting a massive 'bill' for the mail the 'victim' might prohibit relaying on their server, but it's definitely not going to end open relays entirely. All it's going to do is destroy the Internet as we know it.

(BTW, after writing all this... Does anyone know if this idea is actually serious? I can't tell you how many e-mails I've received about how Congress is thinking of an e-mail tax to help the Post Office recoup lost money... Is it actually real now?)

Can you Say Loopholes?

[Dolemite_the_Wiz]

I can't beleive how many loopholes are in these proposals.

Good idea, in theory. Poor, poor architecture.

Dolemite
__________________

Tax impossible without major ISP changes

[Random BedHead Ed]

The current state of e-mail makes a tax impossible. It gives anyone the freedom to set up a mail server anywhere they want. You could easily set up two mail servers at home and send mail back and forth between them and no IRS official would know either exists.

If the federal government wanted to collect a tax on e-mail there is only one way I can conceive to do it - a way that would not make U.S. e-mail incompatible with that of the rest of the world. It could force individuals and businesses use ISP-supplied SMTP servers as relays, and then change ISP behavior by requiring them to tally outgoing mail from their customers, while also blocking SMTP traffic that doesn't use the relay. This requires no changes in the SMTP protocol, but is a major change to the information infrastructure in the U.S., and probably not worth the tax revenue it would generate. It would also be an incredible pain.

I'm not against taxes, I just don't think you can tax e-mail without ruining it. I like Larry Lessig's idea better.

won't work...

[Vaughn Anderson]

This will only hurt the small businesses. Big buisnesses will absorb this cost, and personal people won't pay a dime.

Also, spammers won't pay a penny in this tax... Why? Cause all you'd have to do is setup multiple accounts and ensure that they only send 5000 emails from each account.. just like a dumby corporation is used to buy stocks, etc...

Also think of the intrusion into your own software and computers and ISP management it would take to enforce this, ugh...

How about

[GnarlyNome]

A revision of the protocol which makes the message when it hits your isp , generate an autoreply to any adresses in the header or the body of the message the tremendous volume of mail back to the original isp would have him yanking the spammers account pronto

A Kinder and Gentler Solution

[Brad!ey]

Whenever one of my friends, neighbors or relatives mentions some new thing he bought from an e-mail that showed up in his in-box, I wait until dark and let the air out of two of his tires. The aggravation that this causes will subliminally poison his mind against the spam (that's how superstitions get started). Little enough to do, but one does what one can.

Change SMTP ports

[Anonymous Coward]

If stuff is taxed going over port 25, just change ports! Easier said than done of course. This could also be a good time to look into doing SMTP over SSL or some other secure alternative.

Alternatives?

[Glonoinha]

I am guessing if you get hit with a $.01 per email tax then your highly successful mailing list will simply migrate to another forum for distribution.

As you already have a NNTP userbase working this would probably be one of the better alternatives.

Usenet is pretty much opt-in, and assuming the forum is moderated with a heavy hand to keep it on topic it may even be a better way to keep your channel of communications open.

Re:Alternatives?

[mdinowitz]

Until that forum is taxed as well. The reason people come to me rather than going to the alt.coldfusion group or the macromedia forums is because I provide their tech directly to their mailbox. People tend to like their information direct. I also take care of all the spam, viruses and other 'junk' that gets in the way of a good information source (custom filters across the board). Bottom line is, email is more direct and what the majority of people I've talked to want. Why should they be forced to something else because of spammers. Personally, I've got my own anti-spam plans. All of the archives will be using this code (http://www.fusionauthority.com/alert/index.cfm?al ertid=121#tags5) to hide any email addresses in posts and any post to the lists will hide the email address of the true poster (not their name) while offering an alternate way for individuals to communicate with each other. This thread talks about those plans (http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?m ethod=messages&threadid=23625&forumid=4&refresh=0) . Bottom line is that I believe that there are technical responses to spam that can be taken rather than a tax which will be an unfair burden to many. And this isn't even going into who controls the money and what its used for.

Re:Alternatives?

[steveg]

Usenet is pretty much opt-in, and assuming the forum is moderated with a heavy hand to keep it on topic it may even be a better way to keep your channel of communications open.

Mailing lists such as he is talking about are pretty much opt-in also. And much less hassle for the end user.

Not exactly

[Glonoinha]

The purpose of the tax isn't revenue - I guarantee the government would spend more implementing this than they would collect ... the purpose is punitive : punish the kokgobblers that send out a million spam emails per hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Like that son of a bitch flooding every email address I have with 'Hot housewives in your area.' Even a dinner date with Jeffry Dalhmer would be too good for that guy.

Re:Not exactly

[banzai51]

With offshore accounts and falsified returns, etc. I don't see this as an effective anti-spammer tactic. I believe that all the US govn't sees is: internet...tax. Senator Bedfellow has dollar signs dancing in his head with little regard on how this will affect us good or ill.

Ummm

[Glonoinha]

>it would immediately destroy all noncommercial mailing lists,

You say that like it is a bad thing.

>people would very quickly find a way to disguise their email traffic as e.g. HTTP traffic.

No, more likely they would resume their normal non-commercial mailing lists on Usenet via NNTP. Which is pretty much the original purpose of Usenet now that I think about it (well, actually it was invented to facilitate the distribution of pr0ns, but the next purpose was non-commercial mailing lists.)

Re:Manifestly true, actually.

[Jens]

Spam is one email being sent out a million times.

While most of the SPAM my SpamAssassin catches is personalized (containing my name or email address in the body), this might be so. So what? Sign the mail with the recipient's public key. Get the key from a public key database. Any mail that is not signed properly will be discarded - or, better (during the transition time), will require manual confirmation from the sender.

Evil bit

[Hoch]

I thought that the TCP evil bit was supposed to take care of spam anyway. --hoch

Re:Create a new medium, don't try to fix the old o

[Sherloqq]

• 
  a proposal where e-mail could simply consist of a delivery notice being sent, whereas the actual e-mail itself would be held on the sender's server itself, until the recipient decides to get the message

I think you're referring to Dan Bernstein's project called Internet Mail 2000. Frankly, I don't see how that's any better than just sending the email. I mean, with the current state of things, you have to delete all the messages you don't want, while with Dan's implementation you'll be deleting notices from people you don't want to talk to. It's not about how much disk space they take up, it's about the annoyance factor. It's about the TCP traffic and system resource volume, which at best would equal that of sending a plain ol' email, and at worst (assuming every message would end up retrieved) would be double. So it's gonna cost me at least as much to use his system, while it might cost me more. Well, if the total cost per message is to be higher, I'd much rather have the human intervention portion of the cost minimized and let my CPU pick up the tab. I don't want to be bothered by notices saying that Nguwani Mumbasa has some important information regarding investment opportunities in Nigeria, or that Mrs. N33dl3 D1ck has 5 ways for me to increase the girth of my strategic body parts.

Easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

> When a Pakistani is sending an email to a Turk, who's government website is the Turk supposed to check?

The one in the US, of course. Ever hear of terrorism? Who better than to trust reading your e-mail than the good, honest, US Government?

> What is the tax to be paid in?

US dollars.

> What happens with a country that decides that it will not comply

See IRAQ.

> how do you check the key?

Obviously we'd need some cute, newly patented, protocol invented by some US interest, or other. Then, of course, a flurry of manditory new versions of Windows upgrades. Oh, and of course, a fee to offset the bazillion dollar "costs" of key agent in the US. Let me see, did I forget anything?

Hypothesis...

[PhiloHmm]

People who don't pay for music probably won't pay for email...actually if Apple were to charge per email then maybe it would work.

Here's an idea. If you want to send me an email you pay me 10 cents. Then I'd be happy to get spam.

Re:Create a new medium, don't try to fix the old o

[mr3038]

I wrote "The problem, as I see it, isn't the protocol per se, but the fact that we trust in every step on the path from the sender to receiver." and you replied:

The Verisign way you describe sounds like what I'm talking about, although I don't know about the specific implementation details (could you provide me with a link or two where I could read up more?)

Sorry, but just come up with the idea as I was reading the discussion so I don't have any links. I don't think that the idea of requiring that all messages are signed with a key verified by a known CA is going to fly. We have already PGP (and GPG) so people can send digitally encrypted or signed messages without extra costs (not counting CPU time) and still not that many even know how to make it work. Considering all unsigned mail as a spam is much too coarse filter rule. Counting all signed mail as legimate is 100% sure rule so you can use that for filtering already (you don't even need any specific CA, any one will do just fine for now). Just tell on your web page, or wherever you distribute your email address, that the sender should digitally sign the message. If you require that all messages are signed, you also quarantee that you receive messages from other nerds. Tell the visitor that the mail is quaranteed to get to your inbox if it's signed.

IMHO, the problem isn't the filtering part but to make all users to sign their messages. As we have seen, people do not upgrade their mail software to block security rules that allow the attacker to take full control of the system -- how do you think they would upgrade to digitally sign messages? And to pay for identification by some well-known CA if this catches on?

As for current system wasting many man years with dealing with spam. Yes, that's unfortunate but I really believe that the problem with a new system isn't that designing and coding the software would be expensive but that getting the rest of the world to get it way too expensive.

If we can get users to sign (or even encrypt) all their messages, the spam problem goes away. Perhaps we should campaign to get GPG integrated with Mozilla? Then we could just tell regular users to use Mozilla for their mail...

If all you want is to get rid of spam, simply auto-bounce all messages without approximate value of PI. Just ask the sender to include that in the message body to be able to send you mail. You can be sure not to receive any spam.

OT -1; Anonymous -1; Free pr0n +10;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Slightly off-topic, but it is dealing with e-mail spam so I just had to share. Just received spam at my hotmail account (imagine that ;)), and I'm always curious to look at the sites sometimes (purely scientific reasons of course).

The path was an IP (http://66.181.174.84/), which pointed to a sub-directory on the server. I was going to check out the root directory because there was some weird password thing in the url (as sent to me was churn:bless@66.181.174.84/splsh/log4/). In the root directory, what do we have but lo and behold a free pr0n avi file (divx codecs needed). Weighing in at a whopping 800+ MB it was no easy task, but I downloaded it to verify that it indeed was pr0n. Unfortunately, its in German (like that matters :P) and has bad voice-over, but then again....hey, free pr0n :P ;)

jay

No, you need authentication.

[Kjella]

If I have a @domain.com address, I should be able to send using that address as the from address whereever I am (which is typically not the case now, you get "Relaying denied" based on IP). If I could authenticate with the @domain.com server and make it relay my mail, it should solve almost all real uses for forged headers. Fake from headers is a huge problem because most people don't know that it can be forged, and so blames whoever is in the from header. Your "hidden" fix would be a half-assed fix IMO.

Kjella

Also introduces billing issues

[plierhead]

We would have a related problem at our company too, even though its not-not-for-profit.

We provide an e-recruitment system which emails a company's jobs out to matching job seekers each night.

The number of emails that gets sent out depends on how many new jobs there are and how many job seekers match them. So this sort of tax would be a variable cost that we would have no way to predict.

Of course we could (and would) pass it on to our customers. No problem there. Except that many customers are utterly opposed to having varying bills - they want the surety of a fixed monthly charge. To do that, we'd have to wear the commercial risk of guessing how many emails would go out.

This might not seem a big deal to anyone who has not worked with the HR or billing departments of a large corporate but definitely such a tax would wreak havoc on ASP situations like ours.

Spam Spam Spam Spam...SPAM!

[Azureflare]

I don't think spam is this bad? They keep on saying "Oooooohhhh spammm is going to destroooy teh interneneeeett ahhhhh." The only thing spam will destroy is the service providers who produce/receive it. AOL, MSN, i.e. big name providers are targeted because they have so many users. (Of course, news sites that are OWNED by AOL also are the ones running these stories ...) So, they go down, or become so infested as to become unusable. People who use their services have to find another provider, or stop using the internet, or set up their own email server, or get an email with that local linux server guy in the neighborhood. I think they'd choose to find another provider (and maybe learn that the internet isn't AOL!)

However, all this aside, I still think the best immediate solution is a serverside "white list." Firewalls for spam. Mmm, Broiled Spam.

And this differs from SMTP/TLS/AUTH how?

[Chazman]

I like your suggestion. It's heading in the right direction. The only part about it that's off-base is abandoning SMTP. SMTP is a well-designed and extensible protocol that's weathered the test of time. And it's already got authentication and transport layer security extensions defined and implemented. All that we're missing is widespread *deployment* of these features, and rejection of mail from servers that don't employ them.

Don't go redesigning the wheel. We've got a perfectly good wheel. It's just currently sitting in the spare tire well in the trunk (boot for you Brits). We just need to give mail administrators adequate incentive to bolt it onto the hub and start rolling with it.

non-profit

[mdinowitz]

What's the level of cash in to be a non-profit? I get donations once in a while. I've also just sold $450 worth of banner space to a company for advertising. Finally, I've got a company who's given me a product in return for some advertising space. At what point am I 'for profit'? 2k a year total? 1k? 10k in products?
I'm not unique here. I'm just like every other 'tech fan' site out there with little to no money in and lots out. Tax us and we die. We die and the support for a product dies with us (to a degree). Support dies and the product withers. Products wither and/or die and the economy goes where?

Re:non-profit

[bradleyjg]

Having revenue doesn't invalidate not for profit status. You can have all the revenue you want, so long as the purpose of the organization is not to make a profit.
On the other hand legally forming a not for profit is a major pain, which would probably drive you out as well.

it won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

I can set up a corporation for a couple hundred bucks. If I set up one corporation which will only sends less than 10,000 emails per year, good luck sueing me. Good luck proving that it was spam and not legitimate corporate email. You can but you'll have to sue every company individually.

Stupid idea...

[Kazoo the Clown]

Many spammers will be willing to pay to send me spam email (just as snail-mail spammers do today) and that doesn't mean I'm going to then suddenly want to get all that junk. I have found a solution for snail-mail spam that's been pretty effective-- I refuse to receive mail at my home address and instead use a PO box, and the US mail service doesn't deliver stuff addressed to "resident" to PO boxes (or at least I've never gotten ANY).

And, the same tactic can be applied to phone-spammers. You dial my number, and you get a recording that says "if you know your parties extension, please enter it now." All my friends and business associates, doctors, etc., know my "extension," but the spammers don't, so my phone doesn't ring if it isn't someone that knows me. I can even configure multiple extensions and further identify even the calls I want to get.

The reason these techniques work, is they rely on a two-part address, a "destination" part and an "authorization" part, in effect. With snail-mail, the destination is my PO box address, and the authorization part is my name ("resident", just doesn't get through). With the phone, the primary number is the "destination" part, and the extension is the "authorization" part.

One email equivalent is the use of a white list combined with an auto-reply to those not on the white list that requires they read and comprehend the message and respond with further information that can then put them on the white list automatically (or a blacklist automatically, if desired). It provides the additional authentication needed to weed out spammers. The only drawback is such auto-reply methods don't work when the sender is an automated service itself, such as a mailing list or confirmation message. I'm sure there are other solutions, but taxing the traffic would create all kinds of new problems while not even solving the spam problem. People are willing to spend 18 cents or so to send junk mail to a list of random addresses, I'm sure many will just figure that the cost of sending taxed spam emails out is just a tax writeoff.

Re:Create a new medium, don't try to fix the old o

[Sherloqq]

• I don't think that the idea of requiring that all messages are signed with a key verified by a known CA is going to fly.

Why not? We already expect websites that deal with our private, sensitive data to use SSL, and we expect that the chain of certificates begin in a place we trust -- a known CA. If we can use centrally-issued certificates to give us the peace of mind of protection of sensitive data, why wouldn't we trust those same centrally-issued certificates to shield us from spammers? Is it because we value the former more than clean inboxes? Because so far we haven't put a dollar figure on losing valueable emails due to our inboxes filling up? For some people that's no longer true -- I've heard of people who've missed out on new job opportunities due to email problems. The more email becomes an integral part of our lives like the telephone, the more we will value it.

The problem with self-signed certs is just that. Now, IIRC, PGP works by distributing a public key to others for the purpose of having those "others" encrypt / sign their correspondence to you with that key. So any spammer, willing enough to spam you, could go to the trouble of getting your public key and signing his spam for you with it. How does that protect you? With a centrally-issued certificate your options increase dramatically. Because of the nature of a cert, you can verify whether the sender has the right to use that cert -- if someone stole it, they wouldn't be able to use it unless they forget their IP as well, and the level of difficulty increases. Moreover, if you find that a cert has been compromised, you can block incoming traffic signed with it, and, if you feel like it, alert the owner of the cert of the compromise, much like I wouldn't expect you to continue to purchase something off of the 'net when your browser alerts you that the web server is using a cert it shouldn't be.

Now,if you combined PGP with this "SSL email", you'd get the best of both worlds -- you'd be able to both verify the identity of the sender *and* make sure only those who have your public key (which, if you were really secretive, could be kept semi-private) can email you.

But I still don't think that PGP keys alone would be enough. Instead of CDs for sale that are full of email addresses, they'd be full of email & PGP key combos, and bulk emailers that would incorporate both of these would pop up soon afterwards. Yes, the CPU cost would increase per mailing. Those that want to remain in the business, though, will perservere.

the only fair way to do it

[Dan Crash]

The only fair way to do it (in my opinion) is to take the total amount of money it takes to run the government, and divide it equally among the entire population.

The U.S. Budget for 2004 is $2,229,000,000,000 ($2.2 trillion). The most current estimate of the U.S. population is 290,895,573 people. Divide budget by population and your share equals $7662.55. If you are married, simply double this amount. Please make your check payable to Uncle Sam. Thank you!

Re:the only fair way to do it

[bryanthompson]

damn that sounded a lot better in my head than down on paper. In theory (heh, hmm...) it's fair, but... i guess it's not very realistic.

i guess it's back to the drawing boards

Re:the only fair way to do it

[bradleyjg]

You can bet if this was implimented the government wouldn't waste so much damn money. As long as someone else is paying it (or more accurately the sheep don't know they're paying it in higher prices) no one cares.

Killing off SPAM?

[Crypto Gnome]

It's painfully obvious if you stop to think about it.
Who, of all the bazillions of people using the internet, hurts the most from SPAM?

The ISP(s)

After all, they're bearing the huge and unreasonable SPAM induced costs for

• Additional Bandwidth to receive/send/transit SPAM
• Additional Mail Server requirements
  • CPU
  • DISK
  • Bandwidth
  • Memory
• Customer Support for users complaing about SPAM
• abuse@(insert ISP domain here) emails - for those who don't merely route them to /dev/null

For hundreds/thousands/millions of users/emails, as opposed to the hundreds (maybe thousands) of emails any one particular end user is receiving.

Question Two: Who is in the best position to prevent SPAM from being send?

The ISP(s)

Simply because, somewhere along the line, a SPAMer has to send the SPAM through an ISP. (ie transiting their network, even if not actively using the ISP mail server)

In the end, if enough ISPs cared (enough) about solving this problem, they could work smarter rather than simply throwing money/technology at the problem and we'd all have sweeter lives.

Some suggestions include:

• No More ISP "Pink Contracts"
• ISPs actively, collectively and in collaboration preventing identified SPAMers (eg preventing account/ISP hopping)
• disabling dialup accounts (at least) access to outbound SMTP other than the ISPs mail server (which is setup to filter for spam)

And what can we (Joe Sixpack end-user types) do to encourage the ISPs to care about killing off SPAM?

• signup noc@someisp dot whatever (and other well-known addresses) to known SPAM lists
• forward each and every piece of SPAM to abuse@(your ISP dot whatever)
• ditto forwarding SPAMs to your local elected Government Representative (and just tag on a friendly notice eg "just thought you'd like to see another of these endless SPAM messages I keep getting") so that they're aware of the scope of the problem
• Use a SPAM filter, and report ALL the SPAM you receive ... For Example: checkout SiteTamer
  Lots of good SPAM info and links (I am not in any associated with SiteTamer, just one of the many good finds on Google)

Re:Manifestly true, actually.

[rjh]

So what? Sign the mail with the recipient's public key.

At this point, you've now demonstrated that you have no clue how asymmetric cryptography works, and thus have no business talking about it.

Free hint: you don't sign a message with the recipient's public key. You sign a message using your own private key, and encrypt using the recipient's public key. (Although both are really encryption operations, just on different keys: formally speaking, there is no such thing as a sign operation.)

The biggest flaw

[rjh]

... is that it's a bigger drain on legitimate users than on the spammers. Take the following scenarios:

• Joe Spammer finds an open relay. He sends a million emails out through it, thus bringing the open relay to its knees for a while as it computes SHA-1 hashes. Maybe the sysadmin will close down the open relay as a result, maybe not. New machines come onto the Net all the time, and open relays aren't hard to find. This is a total failure of the CPU tax.
• Joe Spammer finds an open relay, but one which won't do the X-SHA1-Hash field, instead replying with MTA code 666 SPAMMERS MUST DO IT THEMSELVES. Great. Joe Spammer creates a dummy X-SHA1-Hash field and sends a million spams. The MTA then blindly passes this mail on, since it has a dummy field. At its destination, sure, the receiving MTA will strip it out as spam... but that still means 1,000,000 legitimate users have to pay a CPU tax, and the spammer doesn't have to pay anything. Doesn't sound like a terribly effective tax, does it?
• Opens the door for DDoS attacks. Not only do your networks still get clogged with spam, but now your CPU is tied up sorting out "properly taxed" email messages from "untaxed" email messages. Not only can a DDoS attack eat up all your bandwidth... but now a DDoS attack can eat up all your processor, too. This is a nontrivial failure.

Re:The biggest flaw

[theLOUDroom]

Joe Spammer finds an open relay. He sends a million emails out through it, thus bringing the open relay to its knees for a while as it computes SHA-1 hashes.

The proposal would be for all MTAs too reject any messages without a proper hash. Any ip sending to many bad emails would be blacklisted. Any messages without a valid hash would be dropped. Backward compatibility of the system could not be maintained, because it would make the whole idea pointless.

Joe Spammer finds an open relay, but one which won't do the X-SHA1-Hash field, instead replying with MTA code 666 SPAMMERS MUST DO IT THEMSELVES. Great. Joe Spammer creates a dummy X-SHA1-Hash field and sends a million spams. The MTA then blindly passes this mail on, since it has a dummy field.

Two ideas here:

1.So what? That's nothing worse than what happens today, except that when a server finally did check the hash, it would get dropped.

2. The hash could be checked at each step in the chain. I guess this could amount to a lot of CPU overhead. Maybe the solution to this would be to have a list of trusted servers, and a simple anti-IP spoofing mechanism.

Opens the door for DDoS attacks.

It doesn't open the door anymore for DDoS attacks anymore than it currently is. It actually improves the situation slightly since you have more information to use to decide if a message is legitimate. I acknowledge that if all the zombies were computing valid hashes, they could overload the server, but right now the zombies don't even need to compute hashes, just to have bandwidth. But if you have a fleet of zombies, you already have the bandwidth. You probably would also have the CPU power too, but I don't really see it making you much worse off than before. I think processing is cheaper than bandwidth anyways, so you might actually want to make this trade-off.

I really think you have a better idea than you think.

Re:The biggest flaw

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I go to a store I see some Smelly Mexican Beaner in the corner speaking Spanish with another alien co-worker, most likely they're either talking about you, or they just sit there and stare at you. When you ask them a question, (as a customer, such as in a grocery store) they can't seem to speak any English. It makes me want to jump over the counter and pound their faces in, then wash my contaminated hands

My sister happens to be going to modeling school, and is a certified and licensed model. Everywhere we go, all these Mexicans, they don't look, they just stare. Nasty, Ugly, Mexicans with bloodshot eyes. They don't even care if they're being offensive. I am sure if I wasn't around they would probably rape her right there.

You don't even have to look for the sub-human mongrels, you can just SMELL them. Rotting carcasses of cheap labor, polluting our America. If they can get past California and Texas, then they passed the border challenge, and our government gives them a border welcome with welfare checks. Plus all the tax dollars that they will need for education (to justify their inflated tax budget.) Even when they are "educated", they STILL can't speak any proper English, nor do they have any of the wits to partake in a job that requires INTELLIGENCE!

What I don't understand is the government tries to tell us that they are trying to halt the flow of illegal aliens in this country, yet, they'll take these very same illegal aliens and educate them. If they are not educating the wetbacks, then they are surely educating the engross, who still claim to be consumed by the age-old excuses regarding slavery, and their ancestors. What a crock of shit!

Then Greedy Jewish Founded Corporations, will save large amounts of money by hiring cheap labor, so these bean bags can turn around and retire early with the money they take to Mexico, since OUR money is worth more in Mexico than it is here. I read some article somewhere about some Jewish douche bag lemming CEO, in a business magazine bragging about increased revenues because of hiring cheaper labor.

You could just vomit at the sight of this, considering I didn't see one single white man in there! They get a free ride, and it makes me furious! This is the more reason I have in believing in racial separation, in support for a White America. I wish I can put a bullet in every goddamn Mexican that is willing to screw to save their own species.

Re:The biggest flaw

[rjh]

The proposal would be for all MTAs too reject any messages without a proper hash. Any ip sending to many bad emails would be blacklisted. Any messages without a valid hash would be dropped.

As long as we're living in fantasyland, why not just say "the proposal is for all MTAs to disable anonymous relaying"? Isn't that a hell of a lot simpler?

Backward compatibility of the system could not be maintained, because it would make the whole idea pointless. ... And it won't be adopted unless there's backwards compatibility. Standards get firmly entrenched and are infamously hard to get people away from. Look at how many ISPs are rolling out IPv6. Whatever solution you come up with has to (a) solve the problem and (b) be backwards compatible with everything else out there.

It doesn't open the door anymore for DDoS attacks anymore than it currently is. It actually improves the situation slightly since you have more information to use to decide if a message is legitimate

You really want to rethink this one. You get literally one bit of extra information: "did the originating MTA correctly fill out the X-SHA1-HASH field?" For this one bit of information, you have to compute a message hash. You don't get that information until you pay the tax. If you're paying the tax on millions of emails a day, then it's far, far more trouble than it's worth.

Please, please, please, read the literature.

Bruce Schneier has a bon mot about how there are so many completely useless algorithms out there because it's trivial to come up with an algorithm that you can't break. What's hard is coming up with an algorithm that nobody can break. The same applies to antispam proposals. You're coming up with ideas which you can't shoot down, and you're thinking they're new and inventive and potentially useful. What you don't see is that the X-SHA1-HASH idea is as old as the hills, and nobody takes it seriously because of all the damning flaws in it.

Re:The biggest flaw

[theLOUDroom]

As long as we're living in fantasyland, why not just say "the proposal is for all MTAs to disable anonymous relaying"? Isn't that a hell of a lot simpler?

True, but I don't think it would be better. This way you can still send mail, even if no one trusts you.

Standards get firmly entrenched and are infamously hard to get people away from.

I agree. But standards do eventually get changed. All it takes is a compelling enough reason to do so.
Ex: There are good odds the computer you're sitting at doesn't have ISA slots.
There are plently of people who feel a complete solution to the spam problem would be a good reason.
I think IPv6 hasn't taken off beacuse, as of now, there isn't a good enough reason for people to upgrade. Once the availible space in the currect verison is used up, there will be. It good to have the standard designed and in place before people need to switch to it.

What's hard is coming up with an algorithm that nobody can break.

I'll agree with this too. Maybe SHA1 isn't the way to go, I don't honestly know. I'm not saying you should independently design your own hash. Whatever has been out there for years, and has been peer reviewed to death can be used. Your idea doesn't require that the hash be SHA1, it could be something else. IF you're saying there now point in using a hash at all because it's to hard to come up with a good one, then I have to disagree. It's like saying that there is no point to cryptography, which I'm sure Schneier would disagree with.

You really want to rethink this one. You get literally one bit of extra information: "did the originating MTA correctly fill out the X-SHA1-HASH field?" For this one bit of information, you have to compute a message hash.

True, but this one bit of information, doesn't HAVE to be used. It would be possible to send messages from the "New Style V.XP whatever" mailserver, because the old servers could just ignore this field. It just wouldn't be possible to send messages from the old network to the new one. This could be fixed, by allowing messages to be sent the old way, but with the consideration that they are much more likely to be spam.

My belief is that there is a tecnological solution to spam. I think laws might be useful, but most likely will be ill concieved, and that is impossible for laws to make a real dent in the spam problem.

BTW, I think an actualy standard using this idea would need to make provisions for upgrades to the hashing algorithm over time.

Re:Create a new medium, don't try to fix the old o

[pyramid termite]

Right now, I'm not sure the problem justifies a new infrastructure - but the day the government starts taxing e-mail, it'll be time to start a new one.

Tax would do nothing

[DarkVein]

First of all, it's an artificial cost, and it's extremely likely that, in the future, tax exemptions would be given to corporations for "service announcements" or some other slit-tounge perversion of language.

Foremost, however, a penny per post is hardly enough to curb spam. A thousand dollars is piss for the coverage it provides, especially compared with newspaper and television advertisement. More likely, it'd imply legality to spam, and more legitimate businesses would begin funding the straight-to-/dev/null bandwidth decimator.

More fundamentally, there's an assumption that it's possible to tax the source, and that international tax is architecturally sound and desirable. One of two things would be required for this proposition to work:

1. E-mail systems would have to be rearchitectured into source-trustable system
2. An international taxation system would need to be built.

The lovely part of #1 is that it'd solve the spam problem in the first place. The only thing gained by the promise of taxes is government funding and ("gained" is now debatable) government involvement in the design. If #1 is put in place, the tax system is immediately superfulous.

#2 is worse. This would be the first official economic distribution structure for a globally run government. While I'm not intristicly opposed to the concept of world government, I think that this is the absolute worst possible seed for any government in any form at any time. We do not want a government whose origin is in a banalty that is obsolete the second it is possible to enforce collection.

It's a shitfuck idea.

American laws on the global internet?

[zerofoo]

Legislators should not write laws regarding issues they know nothing about. Why is the knee-jerk reaction to every internet problem legislation? The internet is a global network. How, exactly, do you impose/enforce regional laws on a global network?

Issues like spam and pornography are technical issues, and can be solved with technical advancements. Legislation is not the most effective tool for this job; but some fancy AI programming might be.

-ted

They are so full of

[mrmeval]

feces they are a walking biohazard.

Sic the EPA on them!

Of course they want a tax, thay means money and control.

Tax e-mails my ass - this is a Trojan Horse

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it more feasible to make bogus email headers illegal. Any spammer caught using such headers should be fined appropriately.

Next, if any individual receives unsolicited email, he can complain or sue the spammer.

No frickn way should we be taxed for e-mail, we're already paying our ISP for bandwidth used by spammers. Fsck double taxation.

Lessig isn't always so bright

[osgeek]

What a stupid idea.

So, you've got something that should be illegal... spam. Rather than just making it explicitly illegal and dealing with law breakers, Lessig suggests that everyone pay a tax to solve the problem?

Screw that. I pay for my internet connection. If I want to send out 1 million legitimate (non-spam) email messages a year, I shouldn't have to bear any extra costs not already accounted for in the price of my connection.

Economics

[Anonymous Coward]

SPAM continues because it makes a buck. Even though there is a very low response rate, the costs are presently even lower, near zero, or fixed (not based on volume).

If you increase the costs with "postage", then suddenly the microscopic return rate on SPAM isn't enough to cover expenses.

E-stamp way of implementing taxes

[cheungw]

To all. Instead of offering a critique, I'd like to post an actual solution of which a special case would be an E-tax. I call it the E-stamp approach and it can be created now without any legislation. E-stamps can be made with actual monetary value or mere "funny money" value. E-stamps can be made by anyone, anytime just as easily as a digital signature can be gotten from someone like versign. Please read the pdf file I posted at www.wakundama.com/antispamscheme.html Please do discuss and critique the heck out of this. If anyone has the energy to implement this please do. If you want to make money off this. Go ahead.