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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.'"
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.)
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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!
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]
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.
I have written over 900 book reviews
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.
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)?
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.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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!
My journal has hot
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
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
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.
[ home ]
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.
,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.
Additionally
Whitelists are the way to go for me.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
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.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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.
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.
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"?
I have no
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.
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?
.: Max Romantschuk
Not to mention:
Bye-bye free email services
Bye-bye anonymous email-services
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.
Why should 99% of the people have to pay because 1% are fucking it up for everyone else?
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...."
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
(read in simpsosn comic book guy voice)
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.
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.
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.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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?
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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.
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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?
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What about an worm/trojan sending out bulk e-mail? Punishing the victim is a great idea.
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How do you deal with mail across national boundaries? I wonder if he has thought about the world about the USA.
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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:
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.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.
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.
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
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".
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
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.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
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
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.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
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.
Have EVDO, will travel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Perhaps some poor guy could make a living reading spam?_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
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?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
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.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
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!
people who seem to get their kicks out of suggest new taxes?
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.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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.
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).
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..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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.
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.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
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 Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
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.
I've wrestled with reality for 35 years and I'm happy to say, I finally won out - Elwood P. Dowd
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?
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.
Because, sometimes they just have to touch the stove.
-YY1
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.
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=
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....
Only 'flamers' flame!
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....
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?
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?)
________________________________________________
suwain_2
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.
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.
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.
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
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.
Michael Dinowitz House of Fusion http://www.houseoffusion.com
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.
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?Lots of good SPAM info and links (I am not in any associated with SiteTamer, just one of the many good finds on Google)
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
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.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?