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Microsoft, Yahoo Investigate Spam Solution
bllfrnch writes "The NY Times (account required, yada yada) has an article about the suggestion of email postage to stop the advent of spam. Apparently, both Microsoft and Yahoo! support such an initiative, as they are the largest email service providers. Best quote: ''Damn if I will pay postage for my nice list,' said David Farber, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who runs a mailing list on technology and policy with 30,000 recipients'."
Paying for postage already exists, it's called a fax.
This is the worst solution ever and the only reason that MS/Yahoo support it is because of Hotmail/YahooMail. They stand to make huge profits because they host the inboxes of millions of users. Every email received at those accounts would invoice the sender. It's a no brainer for BARRELS OF CASH !!! (tm)
In fact, there already was a good solution proposed a few weeks ago, by microsoft no less. Combine it with Spam Assassin the way Spam Interceptor does (replacing the C/R component) and the solution is plausible.
Story also posted on C-Net (no account required, yada yada).
What hapened to Yahoo's (as yet unveiled) scheme-to-end-all-schemes for authenticating mail? IMHO, I think that SPF:Sender will make great strides towards combatting spam, combined with new laws that make spoofing illegal. And AOL is backing it, so I think there is a good chance for success, as they are both one of the largest sources of e-mail as well as one of the most commonly spoofed domains.
Here is a Washington Times summary that doesn't require registration.
1 23126-8662r.htm
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040202-
And here is a IHT article which appears to feature the same quote as the NYT article. Same article? I won't register...
http://www.iht.com/articles/127677.html
Josh.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Could anyone truely pull this off? Most people would never dream of paying for e-mail. And what's to stop me from setting up my own mail server and sending it off? Step 1: Charge for e-mail Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
It's a ridiculous concept really, the reasons email has become successful to begin with is that it's fast and free. If you charge for email, people will just move over to instant messengers or other systems. And how do you enforce charging people who you may or may not be able to track, the proposal to charge for spam based on the reciever's choice is absolutely ridiculous.
Doesn't seem too smart but at least it's better than the memory and processor cycles idea
Would this really help?
How come stamps can't stop all the spam I get through snail mail? Please, make those AOL disks stop!
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
so now all those poor AOL users will get a huge bill
15.95 internet services
9100.00 e-stamps
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
(but only if the only people who get charged are the spammers.)
So, how are they going to charge their customers that get free email for the postage??? Won't other free emailers pop up and take their place???
And if they only recieve postaged email, who would want to use them????
What's more annoying...spam you have to delete(or is somewhat filtered) or the mess of postage. I would say the mess of postage.
Evolution or ID?
There's no way to enforce this. The irony is that the only way a pay-for-email scheme would work, is in the context of a network of trusted mail relays, which is in effect, A WHITELIST.
All this does is prove that eventually, there will be a network of whitelisted SMTP relays that will do more to combat the spamedemic. You don't need to charge money - that's an extra, goofy idea to make profit for a few select corporate interests. It won't fly because millions of systems will refuse to pay the "postage" extortion fee in order to be whitelisted.
Asking the sender to process a quick math question seems a better solution to me.
Spam boxes would be prohibitively expensive due to the heavy requirements for sending millions of spams, and it would have the added benefit of notifying people when their box has been owned due to 100% processor utilization on said owned relay box.
The money option just sounds like pushing for a new revenue stream. To heck with that.
"AOL is taking a different approach and is testing a system under development by the Internet Research Task Force. The system, called the Sender Permitted From, or S.P.F., creates a way for the owner of an Internet domain, like aol.com, to specify which computers are authorized to send e-mail with aol.com return addresses." Shouldn't AOL have thought of this a long time ago? I remember a few years ago when I used to use AOL and got deluged with FormMail spam with faked @aol.com return addresses. Good to see they're getting their act together.
I can't think of something else that would push an enormous amount of people from email to instant messaging. Someone will change the format to allow messaging of those off-line and bingo. New email!
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
Oh, maybe if the postage goes to further line the pockets of M'soft and Y'hoo, as a likin worked, I can see their true motivation.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How will this affect websites sending their users emails from requested sources?
Like I'm the programmer of Gemsites, a Slashdot clone. When we register a user, we shoot them an email. So are we going to have to pay money to do that?
Because that would be totally stupid, and it would possibly put an end to discussion websites that require logons to validate users, unless there was a method to bypass the charge for sending email.
The way Microsoft will turn it, would be that we all *should* be paying per email, because of this reason or that reason. Bottom line is Billy Goat Gates on his mountain of cash, trying to pile up more of it.
Everyone, please go home and open your mailbox. Now tell me if having to pay for postage has cut down on the level of unsoliceted mail arriving in you snailmail mailbox.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
What you say? Microsoft would get huge bills because of the abusers of it's Hotmail service? That would be a pity, wouldn't it?
It seems that both Yahoo, and lately Microsoft, have discovered a pretty good solution for spam. My YM mailbox has been largely spam-free for a few months, and in the last week or two, Hotmail has been doing a pretty good job as well. Every now and then a spam gets through, but that's about it.
What is wrong with migrating to a replacement for SMTP? What is wrong with developing better challenge/response systems?
...
If email gets a postage fee applied to it, people will stop using it. If I have to pay to send mail to someone at yahoo or hotmail, I would tell that person to get a different email address. No one is going to use email if it has a mandatory fee attached to it. Then again, maybe that's what needs to happen to give people a reason to stop using SMTP
I mean, paying for postage has stopped advertisers from sending marketing materials to my home. Oh wait, sorry. This is a terrible idea!
-Alec
Wasn't one of the hallmarks of a doomed .com company the fact that they tried to get people to pay for something they usually got for free?
Just spitballin' here..
Joe
Think about how much junk mail you get in your post box already? You think charging is going to eliminate it? I just checked my mail. I got a bill, the new issue of Rolling Stone and 6 pieces of junk mail sent to "Current Resident" which promply went straight to the trash.
I wonder how many trees would be saved if people stopped sending junk mail.
Why can't MX records become required to list all in AND out going official SMTP for a domain. From then on, SMTP servers could reject non matching MXed sender IPs and if spam does get through - you know you to blame.
Here.
Who profits? Who will regulate the size and the postage on that? Would they still agree that this is a great Idea is the US postal service was the one that made a profit?
I am still surprised to this day that there is not a better solution to e-mail. Maybe that is the next killer app....the race is on boys they are just trying to figure out how to make the most money on it.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Exactly how will this work outside the US? Considering that $0.01 is a lot of money in third-world countries, and not much in the UK, you can't just make it a flat rate. But if you make it a sliding scale, what's to prevent a spammer from using an address in Somalia to make it cheaper?
G
Other proposed solutions involve lengthy computations on a sender's machine, which can be trivially verified on the receiver's machine. These will be overcome with faster machines, and spammers can afford better hardware than the rest of us anyway. Legislation is no solution, as the only sort that respects the First Admendment rights of emailers provides the same rights to unsolicited email.
As the saying goes at our local Mensa chapter: wise thoughts may go into your mind, but pultem calidus invado pantorum. At the end of the day postage is the cheapest option, given the cost of enforcement or technology updates.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I remember HE who's name shall not be spoken on this site predict this already in the 1995-book The Road Ahead? It's been a while since I read it so I don't recall this exactly, but I do remember something about this is in the book... gr Bas
I realize you're being facetious, but I still don't get 100 AOL discs a day, like I do spam. Hell, if I did, I wouldn't have had to use my nice Snoop CD for my wall mural.
What about me who runs a mail server (a legit one at that for a no-profit) on an old Pentium 166? It's a fine smtp server but don't ask it to do any heavy math. This would screw the little guy using old hardware too.
Evolution or ID?
Someone also has to provide software and systems to meter and invoice email. Gee, who could that be...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If that worked, then regular mail would have no junk mail, because no one would pay the postage. Yet every time I open the mailbox, I am greeted with a fistful of unsolicited advertisements. The only way to "block" email spam is to not have an email address. For every measure put in place, there will be someone willing to work around it.
stuff |
1. copy link location (here: "http://www.nytimes.com/2004/ and so on...") :-)
2. google search for the URL: search for "http:// and so on"
3. ignore that you got no search results and click on the link below "If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: " (and yes, it is the same link!)
4. enjoy reading
my tweezer skills. It's not enough that I've spent decades removing paperclips, business cards, broken diskettes, credit cards, diskette labels, coins, and other assorted crap from drives and systems....
Now I need to worry about stamps too, just as my eyesight is diminishing.
Score one for the hardware folks! Best idea ever!
Oh, great. One of the proponents is a bulk-emailer called "Goodmail", who wants this system because if they pay to send out spam (with the postage going to ISPs), the ISPs will have a financial incentive not to block them.
>;k
...A scheme to encourage spammers to send out even more trojan laden viruses to send their spam from compromised machines at the expense of the victim.
I fail to understand how a scheme that involves the schemes administrators making a profit for every mail sent is going to reduce the amount of mail sent.
"Linux is a serious competitor"
- Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Microsoft Corp.
Heh, here's a choice quote, from an exec at Goodmail, one of the postage schemes that would allow postage paid spam right into your inbox:
"The very notion that I have to get permission to send you a marketing message doesn't make sense and is not good public policy,"
I think it's GREAT public policy. If I don't want your ads, tough shit.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Yahoo! Mail already has a spam filter engine, and it's ridiculously effective for a freemail provider. I rarely use my Yahoo account, but still tend to check it daily for email that should go to my new email addy and doesn't.
On a typical day, Yahoo! Mail will have around 100 new spam messages for me, and only two to six of them will make it to my inbox. After a quick setup a month or two ago, I can now check them all with one click and have them identified and deleted as spam with a second click.
While I understand Yahoo! wanting to lessen the burden on their filtering software by supporting postage, I think the sheer cost of such postage would eliminate Yahoo! Mail as a free service and wipe out most of its users in the process. I honestly can't imagine why they would want to use it instead of their already very effective spam traps.
I heard some guy from Microsoft talking about some of MS's spam plans, after billg committed the company to stopping spam by 2006. They seem to really like the idea of hash cash, which certainly seems like the most reasonable bolt-on solution.
I think the best bet for Microsoft's anti-spam campaign would be to be as open as possible with the process. If they could come up with a standard for hash cash, enable it on every Exchange server, as well as provide it for every Sendmail, Qmail and Postfix server, they would have a huge PR victory. Everyone would be focusing on how Microsoft cured spam and they could start to shake their buggy image.
They've got two temptations they'll have to avoid if they want to win this battle though. The first is their culture: they're notorious for only using standards when it suits their needs. They need to be political about getting the standard accepted everywhere, which means playing nice with the Internet as a whole. The second is to try and use this to throw their monopoly weight around. If they say "only Exchange servers can user our powerful anti-spam techniques" people will turn off the spam protection so that they can get mail from Linux mail servers. I'm pretty sure they're too smart for the second one.
Basically, this is intuitive to most Slashdot readers. Open networks are bigger than closed networks and a network's value is exponential of its size. If MS can make an open spam solution they'll have helped build a very valuable network.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Gates Backs E-Mail Stamp in War on Spam
By SAUL HANSELL
Published: February 2, 2004
hould people have to buy electronic stamps to send e-mail?
Some Internet experts have long suggested that the rising tide of junk e-mail, or spam, would turn into a trickle if senders had to pay even as little as a penny for each message they sent. Such an amount might be minor for legitimate commerce and communications, but it could destroy businesses that send a million offers in hopes that 10 people will respond. The idea has been dismissed both as impractical and against the free spirit of the Internet.
Advertisement
Now, though, the idea of e-mail postage is getting a second look from the owners of the two largest e-mail systems in the world, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Ten days ago, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that spam would not be a problem in two years, in part because of systems that would require people to pay money to send e-mail. Yahoo, meanwhile, is quietly evaluating an e-mail postage plan being developed by Goodmail, a Silicon Valley start-up company.
"The fundamental problem with spam is there is not enough friction in sending e-mail," said Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo's manager for communications products.
The company is intrigued by the idea of postage, Mr. Garlinghouse said, because it would force mailers to send only those offers a significant number of people might accept. "All of a sudden, spammers can't behave without regard for the Internet providers' or end users' interests, " he said.
Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft have made any commitment to charging postage, in part because the idea still faces substantial opposition among Internet users.
"Damn if I will pay postage for my nice list," said David Farber, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who runs a mailing list on technology and policy with 30,000 recipients. He said electronic postage systems are likely to be too complex and would charge noncommercial users who should be able to send e-mail free.
"I suspect the cost of postage will start out small and it will rapidly escalate," he added.
In the meantime, the big Internet providers, including Microsoft and Yahoo, in recent weeks have renewed talks that stalled last year about creating technological standards to help identify the senders of legitimate e-mail. That way, spammers would either have to identify themselves or risk that users would discard all anonymous mail.
But for the big Internet access providers, or I.S.P.'s, the prospect of e-mail postage creating a new revenue stream that could help offset the cost of their e-mail systems is undeniably attractive.
"Sending large volumes of e-mail involve costs that are paid for by the I.S.P.'s and eventually by consumers," said Linda Beck, executive vice president for operations at EarthLink. "Should there be some sort of financial responsibility borne by the originators of these large volume programs? I think there should." E-mail between private individuals, she added, ought to remain free.
Differentiating among classes of e-mail is one of the substantial technical difficulties that e-mail postage proposals face. In wrestling with this matter, academic researchers have proposed complex stamp systems in which each e-mail recipient sets the price for a message to enter his or her in-box. Mr. Gates talked at Davos about a system that would allow users to waive charges for friends and relatives.
Goodmail, founded by Daniel T. Dreymann, an Israeli entrepreneur, is developing a system that it hopes will be easier to adopt. It proposes that only high-volume mailers pay postage at first, at a rate of a penny a message, with the money going to the e-mail recipient's Internet access provider. (The company suggests, but does not require, that the Internet providers share the payments with their users, either through rebates or by lowering monthly fees.)
The Goodmail system is desi
I thought I had been keeping up with the spam-stopping stuff, but I had never heard of this idea. It seems like a very good idea to me, pros and cons anyone?
-1, "1337" speak
Yahoo wants to find a solution to stop spam? Stop offering free e-mail accounts. Half of the spam I get comes from yahoo, the other half is from Hotmail.
Maybe if they would charge a dollar or two a month and make it an even better service such a problem wouldn't exist with them.
this sure works for snail mail.
To:Microsoft From: Istar Muhbar Would u loike 2 no how 2 st0p spamz?
Setec Astronomy
Same as always. What about mailing lists?
Many spammers hijack other peoples email accounts, or use fake/stolen credit cards to get email address from big providers (like Earthlink).
So this same person will go on Earthlink with their stole credit card, rack up some huge postal bill on the credit card from all the spam he/she sends out, but never actually get stuck with the bill.
Hacking/backdoors would also become more predominate on people computers, so the hacker/spammer can spam from valid email addresses without getting charged. This would just cause more problems then already exist.
Its not what it is, its something else.
How about the RECEIVER? If someone sends 100 e-mails, make it akin to sending each recipient a nickel (for their time/etc).. So next time I open my inbox and have 1000 new messages, I just made fifty bucks.
Like spam people use their web front end. Yahoo and Microsoft have open relay servers. Maybe they should only allow people to access their accounts via the web.
Then make sure a person can not past a large number of recipients (like thousands) into the To field.
I don't use Yahoo and Microsoft free accounts because they are CRAP -- spammers can hack into their flawed business logics. (Just too many spammers use them from them).
worst....idea....ever
The Goodmail "solution" is the worst of all possible worlds. What they want to do is convince people doing spam filtering that paid-for spam should still go through. They want to raise the quality of the spam, not get rid of it.
Please. That's not the answer.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
This would put a huge damper on collaberation with companies. If it cost me for all the eails I send for the projects I work on then I wouldn't send them. It would make my job harder and make the products I work on more costly and and take longer to due just due to the fact of it slowing down my work or i have to wait longer for things.
Evolution or ID?
...by selling their lists to:
NSA
CIA
FBI
NASA
Spammers...
Grief, adding 'postage' to email is gonna totally kill the 'new economy'. A technological solution is needed, not an economical one.
Some people already get IM spam. If people started using IM instead of e-mail spammers would move to IM too.
None of the proposals by Microsoft and Yahoo are new. They have been suggested on mailing lists like Cypherpunks for over five years now.
Every time they get posted, the same reasons get pointed out why they will not work.
What it has proved is that people are willing to cling to an idea long after it has been proven to be false.
The anti-spam crowd can now be officially declared a religion.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
This joke comes around every couple of years and always manages to reel in a few suckers... a journalist as well this time it appears!
I fully agree with Farber. Why on Earth should we have to pay for a service that works perfectly fine while free, or almost free(pay to get the address to which mail is sent). I get spam everyday, I also get a credit card, DVD, CD, or some other offer in my snail mailbox everyday. I'm not really a big save the trees guy, but for me it is easy and less guilty to put email in the trash than it is to put real letters in the trash.
You don't even need the math question. Since most spammers use invalid return addresses, all you need is any question. "Are you a real user?" usually works fine, as I've seen with TMDA.
If the spammers did use valid return addresses, then we would know where they are, and they would already be crippling themselves with the enormous number of bounces they would receive from invalid addresses.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
And how do you enforce charging people who you may or may not be able to track, the proposal to charge for spam based on the reciever's choice is absolutely ridiculous.
This is not so hard at all; you simply require the payment be placed in an escrow account before the mail server will accept the message. The sender would include some unique token in the message headers that corresponds to the escrow funds.
Read about it here: Selling Interrupt Rgihts. The article is from 2002, btw, this is hardly a new concept.
So what's going to stop someon from writing a virus that sniffs someones email settings in the registry, and then starts sending SPAM through that server as that person ?
Unlike the current situation where SPAM is stealing resources (and a little cash) the game will change so that SPAM steals peoples e-cash.
Clearly whatever this initiative is aimed at doing, making things better for legitimate users of email is not at the top of the list.
...Does this mean if I don't pay, I won't get another email from yahoo or msn?
Remind me again, where's the downside of this?
--Storm
Reading the headline reminded me that I heard a story on NPR while laying in bed this morning about ways to go about eliminating spam on the internet.
Not sure if it contains any "new" information, but it might be worth a listen.
Sorry to whine, but why would my post be modded a troll? I was completely serious. See my history of posts and you will see that I frequently post about spam and various solutions, including several about SPF:Sender.
I have a Yahoo.com e-mail account and I agree. However, the problem is only solved for you, not them. They still have to add extra hardware (with associated increased power and maintennance costs) because of the volume of spam coming in.
The problem with comparing the junk mail you recieve at home, with email spam is flawed. The two systems are different enough, even if it's hard to see at first.
Snail Mail spam, gets a 'pre-sorted bulk rate', so they usually concentrate on a certian market( geological, company customer bases etc. etc.) Also with a physical address you have a pretty good idea of the location of the customer.
Email Spam is just a 'shotgun load of crap', launched at the internet like buckshot. Part of what makes email spam 'work' for the spammer is that they pretty much hit 'everybody'.
I guess what I am trying to say is the email spammer is more likely to bombard 'everyone' because it costs the same. Snail mail will try to 'target' an audience, but still send out lots more mail than they would if they had to pay first class postage( what you or I have to pay to mail).
If they do institute a percharge for email, there should be no 'bulk discount'.
This space intentionally left blank.
Well I'd hope that I could set up lists of e-mail addresses that don't need to be challenged. So e-mail groups would have some configuring to do, but it seems like it would be pretty easy to build in some safeguards so not EVERY mail is computationally challenged, but unsolicited mails are.
Dunno, just thinkin' off the top of my head here.
That's naive. You know Ralsky and the like use open relays around the world. He's even contracted some in China. You might tighten a net at best, but eventually you come back to the problem of trying to bill non-USA service providers. Lotsa luck. At best you encourage them to clean up their open relays and implement some decent security, lest their IP traffic be blocked at the border. But this should already be happening. Start locking these things out and they'll get around to fixing things pronto.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yet again Microsoft is doing their best to prostitute something which is currently "free" into something which they can use to screw their customer for unreasonable amounts of cash.
Today they're trying to "embrace and extend" email.
A Microsoft backed solution will lead to proprietary enhancements, patent litigation, prosecution and the general demise of email other than through Microsoft Proprietary Commercial Products.
Oh and you can forget about sending email from any *NIX like OS, absolutely not from any GPL or otherwise OpenSource OS.
I am not predicting the future, these things have already occurred In other areas of computing, just not email (yet).
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
remark that there will be no more spam by 2006? I guess this is one of his solutions. han solo
This pay-for-postage e-mail model.. what is the money paying for?
* The bandwidth and network resources used?
We already pay for that; we have quotas and guidelines in place regarding bandwidth, storage quotas and restrictions on spamming with all ISPs.
* Subsidizing a new mail system that is "spam free?"
Does anybody think that if Yahoo and Microsoft hijack the e-mail network, they won't abuse it? Both companies have a sordid history of deploying disposal privacy policies and spamming their own users, sometimes to the point of creating so much noise they upsell users on value-added solutions to solve the problems they create.
The only way a pay-for-postage model would work is if the major networks go private and make their e-mail systems un-integrated with the existing SMTP network. Do you want Microsoft, Yahoo or a handful of powerful corporations to be in control over the e-mail system?
* Why pay per-message anyway? It's an ineffective argument to claim such quantum pricing is necessary and that resources would require it, nor would it teach people to be more responsible in their mailing practices.
80% of the traffic on the Internet is junk mail. If we simply enforced existing laws regarding network exploitation and computer tampering, we'd instantly negate the main value of the pay-per-e-mail article, and even with the system in place, there's absolutely no provision to address the larger problem of unauthorized SMTP traffic hogging bandwidth.
I don't have a problem with the idea of paying extra to have a spam-free e-mail network, but on a per-message basis, it's just stupid and greedy. If we're going to pay, I recommend it go like this:
1. Add a small fee to each domain registration which goes to establish a regulatory group, that adopts an international standard for responsible mailing practices.
2. Contract out, just like we do with the TLD system, the administration of a centralized SMTP whitelist, with a system of checks-and-balances to effectively "license" responsible mail relays.
3. Offer anyone running a mail server, the option of using the centralized whitelist to approve the systems from which it will accept mail.
I have been saying for more than a year, this is the way to go. This scheme by MS and Yahoo is a flavor of what I'm saying, with the tacked-on idea of charging per-message, and instead of making the mail network an open system, it would be controlled by select corporate interests.
We're heading in the right direction, but this scheme by Microsoft and Yahoo has a long way to go.
So spammers would simply send a virus and 0wn hundreds of thousands of Windoze boxes, making a supercomputer that can overwhelm any "Computational Challenge" solution.
But how would this solution address legitimate mailing lists, where the mailing list server actually has justifiable reason to send to hundreds or thousands of people at once? Why must any system that runs a mailing list necessarily have a whole crapload of CPU horsepower to go along with it?
And if any allowance is made for making the load on legitimate mailing lists more tolerable, what is to stop spammers from exploiting the same allowance, effectively removing all the benefits that were originally offered?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Here it comes! A way to really make money on the internet.
First it will cost 2cents, Then after a year they will raise it to 4cents.
Then after that they will raise it to 7 cents because they can and nobody can give you a justification of such a large increase.
I wrote it up here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=94145&cid=807
The key points:
You set the fee, and collect it.
You can refund the fee if you wanted the email.
You can add people to a whitelist.
The whitelist uses digital signatures, not easily-forged header fields.
It doesn't really work unless we have a micropayment system that can charge small amounts (five cents) without expensive overhead.
In the discussion attached to that article, one person pointed out that this system could be exploited like this: advertise a job, one that looks like it's really worth applying for. Charge about 20 cents per email to accept resumes. Pocket all the money. It's a perfect small-time fraud scheme: you steal so little, from so many people; who would be motivated enough to check up on whether there was ever really a job to apply for?
I have to say, even without the charging of fees, a whitelist based on digital signatures would be great. You could have a special folder where known-good emails go, and another one for the rest. I'd have my email client play a chime sound when known-good emails arrive, but not the rest.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
would it work if the senders are required to either pay for the email, or face a computational challenge?
so for big companies who charge a fee for subscription, they probably don't mind paying to do a mailinglist.
for personal emails, people will probably choose to compute than pay.
1) The computing solution
/.ers would be prohibitively expensive.
How exactly is this change over going to take place over the next two years? As soon as a few major corporations implement it they won't be able to receive email from those who haven't. That not too mention the fact that the communcation of said calculation is another drain on the net while we wait (supposedly hopefully) for people to adopt the new calc procedure. If it is made backward compatible then whats the point in doing it at all? The only way to filter out those emails is to lump them into a seperate folder - while "we" are "adopting" that folder is rapidly going to be viewed as a spam filter. Unfortunately it is going to get filled with good emails. I don't know about you, but my baysian filter works pretty damn well right now.
2) Paying for email? This one has so many holes it is laughable. First, who collects postage, ICANN, W3C, Microsoft? And who collects the fee for international mail? And how is it dispersed? And who is going to keep the price reasonable? I myself send upwards of 20 emails a day. That is going to get damn expensive even at $.10 an email.
And if the "postage" is implemented, what about email lists? Sending to 100,000's of
I could go on, but I am sure everyone else can see how assinine the solutions are.
-Coach
"Never upset a goalie, getting hit with a blocker is an unpleasent experience - facemask or not." -Me
btw - it would do nothing for spoofed addresses from real domains....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
This pretty much says it all. If there's a postage charged for email then email will become all spam, not spam free.
The first to go will be lists like the above, no free newsletter is going to be able to justify paying postage on mailings of 30,000 or more.
Along with that will be the automated emails. Think /. will still email you when someone responds to your post if it costs them? Think again. You will not get email order confirmation, notice about your rebates, shipping tracking information, or other automated business related email that you want either.
Some people might pay a micro payment on some email, but others will not. Rather than being the killer app for the Internet, email will fall into disuse.
While all of this is going on, the spammers are not going to be slowed one damn bit. If they could be held accountable they would be stopped already. They will either continue to sign up for throw away accounts and then abandon them and not pay for the email, or they will continue to make their deals with shady ISP who damn well know they are spammers and let it slide. If a spammer has a deal with an IPS to send spam you can bet he isn't really going to pay the ISP postage fees. Worse yet, the claim will be made that the spammer is paying postage fees, and that those supposed fees omehow make it legitimate for then to cram your mailbox with spam for the p3nis patch and the paris hilton video xjrf.
And one other effect it will have is that I will certainly not pay to forward all the hundreds of daily spam I get to utc@ftc.org, and other spam fighters will see their complaints of spam dry up too.
In short order, much of the valid uses of email will come to an end because of this "postage", and spammers will continue completely unaffected. And it seems hard to believe that Yahoo and Microsoft don't already understand this.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
"Asking the sender to process a quick math question seems a better solution to me."
Well, it might not stop spam, but it'll help me get some work done.
Your email has been held in a queue until you answer the following question: "Given the vector x,y,z, calculate the look-angles phi, theta, psi, formatting your answer as C++ code"
Outbound mail as well as inbound mail should be checked at the ISP level
for both spam and virus.
"The very notion that I have to get permission to send you a marketing message doesn't make sense and is not good public policy," said Richard Gingras, Goodmail's chief executive.
What the hell? It >does make sense from a consumer's perspective, and it might not be good public policy to a corporation because how else will people really know that they want thier product? Unless they actually knew that they needed it, and looked for companies that would produce it?
I'm sure this has been said but how about blacklisting SPAM providers. I know we do that now but how about a better system to do that. Maybe ISPs that allow their IPs to send spam get blocked. The whole IP block.
Why should we pay/white list it when we can black list it?
Evolution or ID?
Of course, the ongoing costs to fight the spammers will require this postage to go up and up and up....
...and it will utlimately be as futile as the war against snailmail spammers.
I mean if you talking about a whitelisted network of trusted/know valid smtp servers there is going to be some cost involved (validation of both individual users and networked servers). If that cost where low enough I'd happily pay a few dollars (on time fee? annual?) to get an account (sounds like getting a digital certificate but without all the geek factor) that I could send from as a know/validated user.
Quack, quack.
Actually, this problem can be solved without charging postage on each and every piece of email.
The problem can be addressed by putting people at risk of being charged postage. This can be done by requiring that senders post a bond of say 1/10 of 1 cent per item sent.
If you are sending 30,000 pieces of mail a week, your bond would only be $30.00. If people like your email, you will never have to pay the toll, but if they don't like it, then you will be subject it.
The folks that will be caught in this web are spammers and direct marketers. They send millions of spams in the hope that just a few folks will bite. If we raise their cost of doing it above the return, they will be out of business ASAP.
The only way to kill spam, which depends on a frictionless mailing process, is to introduce some friction (i.e. cost) into the system.
Yours,
Jordan
it's like having oj administrate the battered womens' shelter, except these guise also want to be billyonerrors at everyone's eXPense?
I remember the original idea being something like this:
1) The user determines how much to charge to read email from someone not on his/her whitelist. For example, I would look at untrusted emails for at least $0.10 a pop.
2) The user can choose not to collect the payment if the unknown sender is someone legitimate, like an old acquaintance, a friend with a new email address, a job offer, etc.
This would effectively kill spam without creating much of an inconvenience to legitimate email.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
Nice to see that old urban legendenjoying a comeback. Heck, it may ever turn out to be true. If it does, I hope they have the foresight to actually designate it with this non-standard identifier.
Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.
Seems to me the quickest way to prove how little postage does for spam would be to sign up a few top-level MS and Yahoo execs for every free catalogue there is... anyone up to posting names and addresses? ;)
(Yeah, I'm mostly joking, but wasn't it slashdot that reported it when the "Spam King" got this same treatment?)
The longer I'm a member of the Human Race, the more I believe Apocalypse is a valid solution.
There are millions of stolen credit card numbers floating around. It may be risky to use them on products delivered to a home, but what about the spammers. How many spammers are going to be buying these numbers and using them to charge up their spam? Could this cause an increase to identity theft? -
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
I'm not against paying for services of this nature, but per-message is ridiculous and greedy.
We already "pay" anyway. More than half the bandwidth used is taken up by spam. Curbing the propagation of spam would have major returns in the form of saved system resources and bandwidth. It's analagous to noticing that the vaccine for an ailment is actually cheaper than the treatment.
That notwithstanding, there are a number of ways to pay for such a system; the most obvious is something like a few bucks extra for each domain renewal/registration - this would FULLY FUND a major centralized SMTP whitelist not unlike how the root server network is set up.
But another method of delivering news is available to content serializers: RSS feeds. RSS feeds allow for true "push" content delivery like email. But, RSS feeds are not as easy to grasp, access or view as email.
Proposal: create an add-in RSS feed aggregator into common email platforms such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla, Eudora, pine (kidding), etc. Build content creation mechansism into the same email clients with the ability to post the feeds to a public directory (Google? Anyone listening?) with various subscription options on both ends.
This way email could be returned to a person-to-person(s) communication tool for low-volume communication needs; content aggregators could better server their readers/viewers and we can all experience whirrled peas.
Whatever. Anyway, just an idea -- what thinkest thou?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
False positives from good filters are infrequent enough that only the borderline-spammy are likely to trip up the filters often enough to be willing to pay for an edge to be let through.
Like the Habeas SWE mark, email postage will quickly evolve into a mark which can be used to distinguish spam from wanted email.. if it's got e-postage, it must be spam!
This idea just will not go away! It's like a zombie from some old horror movie!
... okie it would certainly lower spam; by killing email completly in the process. There would be nobody left to spam! It's like using a thermonuclear weapon to swat a fly. And as in all good old horror movies, the fly will come back horribly mutated and worse than before.
Charging for emails
I can understand Microsoft, but I'm suprised at Yahoo! They should know better.
Okay, the satisfying solution - kill all spammers. "It's the only way to be sure." Yet when I suggest this, people look at me like _I'm_ the criminal! *shrug*
Solution 2 - new technology for mail servers. A combination of a black list and a white list and challenge/response. If you make it through the challenge, depending on the destination user's preference, you automatically make it onto the white list. The user can (should) set up a list of people/mailing lists already on their whitelist. The user can generate one-time email addresses that will let, say, an ecommerce site respond to them, and that first response's from address gets added to the whitelist, but anything else using that address gets bounced as spam. Bounce messages get tossed, not responded to. Any challenge not responded to in x amount of time (configurable) get tossed (or put in a bin for the user to check on periodically).
The hard parts: requires new software, requires users (who are almost ALL stupid) to respond to a challenge if they've never emailed that person before.
Good: stops spam at the server level, not at the mail client level. Doesn't require government intervention. Puts user in control of email they get. An IQ test of sorts for people to get onto mailing lists (yay!).
Now WHY is this SO hard? An upgraded version of TMDA could do it if you slap a web interface on it.
Today, spammers are using virus's.
Almost all the last major virus's have been written by spammers (including Sobig and MyDoom)
When you have 100 000 infested machines, sending 100 million spam-messages is only a matter of 1000 per box. (and 100 000 is a LOW number of infested machines)
As there are mailing lists with more than 1000 recipients, the computational challenge must permit this in reaconable time, so there is no problem for the spammer.
Sure, it might kill those low-budget-hobby spammers, but the few big ones will be completly unaffected.
And allmost all spam DOES come from a few big spammers.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
There already is a solution... It is called a digital signature and comes from a Certificate Authority. Couldn't ISP's, Yahoo, or even Hotmail be required to issue PKI certificates to a paying user? Email administrators would then have the option of dropping any email that wasn't digitaly signed (as coming from a legitimate CA). This digital signature would shed light on the responsible parties involved in sending SPAM. Then fines could be levied on the guilty parties. Screw the stamp people. I already pay for the privilage of sending email.
gllshhht...
Bayesian filters are turning spam into an incomprehensible mess of near-random words and characters. At some point, it's gonna stop working.
Postage wouldn't be bad if the recipient gets the money...he's the one getting bothered. If two people email back and forth the net effect is zero. If the recipient can override postage with a whitelist, even better. You need a good micropayment infrastructure to make it work.
Or, just send unknown senders a turing challenge. "Who's the U.S. President?" or something. Do it only when the email fails the Bayesian filter, that way most legitimate unknown senders can get through fine, but you have a little protection for false positives.
People complain about the challenge idea, but what's more annoying: 1) Answering an occasional challenge (very occasional if combined with Bayes), 2) Paying postage, or 3) Never getting a response because your email has been lost in a heap of spam?
First of all, every email I send is already paid for with the check that I sent to my cable company every month. I pay them to relay my messages to other people who have (probably) paid to have the ability to receive such messages. It seems very pompous of Yahoo and Microsoft to suggest that the free and open protocols and agreements that have allowed free information exchange for decades. I would rather have another free and open SMTP replacement than have to pay to forward jokes and virus warnings to all my friends...
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
One thing to realize is that you don't have Yahoo and Microsoft asking themselves, "What can we do to solve this spam problem?"
What they are pondering in reality is, "How can we make money off this spam problem?"
Once you understand this, their goofy, impractical ideas make sense... at least to them.
They're not just doing it for money... They're doing it for a SHITLOAD of money!
The answer to the prof's concer is RSS. You give back control of subscriptions 100% to the 30,000 subscribers and eliminate all that mailman/listserv/lyris/yahoogroups/topica nonsense.
If you've ever seen a post to a public list that reads "please take me off your list" you know how goofy subscription management via email can be. RSS is intuitive. Email listserv is not.
I'm not endorsing the email postage solution, but I'll take it if it helps the spam problem significantly. I can control my own mailing lists, Professor. Don't underestimate your users. If they want what you got, they will find a way to get it.
slashsearch.org - slashdot search. powered by google.
Just in case you're not making a joke (sorry if you are!) the grandparent post was actually about asking the computer that's sending the email the "question": some sort of factoring question most likely.
Or if we just convinced the RIAA that spam was affecting their music sales
;-)
hummm, I think your on to something here.
how 'bout a peer to peer system that uses open relays. Pit the RIAA against the spammers and let them fight it out!
Thats a fight that I would like to watch!
So, I realize that this is heresy on slashdot, but, playing devil's advocate:
What is so wrong about paying for a resource you are using? Few people expect free phone calls, why should sending "email" bits be different than sending "voice" bits? (ok, a lot of people now use the internet to have free international phone conversation, etc. etc.). Many people on slashdot believe in capitalism - under which you expect to pay in some way for most services. Do we just expect free email because we've always gotten free email, or is there a fundamental reason why email should be free?
Note, I am asking this as a philosophical question separate from implementability of a system like email stamps, or whether it will cost more to charge for 0.00001 cents worth of service than you get, or whatever.
-Marcus
And a computational challenge would sure as hell stop me from forwarding the hundred to two hundred or more spam emails I get each day to uce@ftc.gov. So there woul,d only be negative effects from a computational challenge or from postage, not positive ones.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I hope I didn't give PEPSI or the PO any ideas there.... :-/
1888 Franklin St.
Catch a clue, moderators. This is a flamebait:
Now that's Flamebait, buck-o.-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
How about an RFC that builds a protocol on top of mail, using mail headers? such that each person builds their own whitelist. If u wanna email someone, you have to request permission to be added to their list, akin to adding people to your buddy list. It really wouldnt be that hard. perhaps each mail server would have its own whitelists for each user on it. then the mail server asks the client (triggered by a request for addition) if its ok to add this sender? if not, its rejected and all ones after that from that sender. if not the mail server delivers. Mail clients would have to have some sort of way to manage this database, but if you dont have an RFC XXX compatible client, get one or stop complaining about spam.
Error: Id10t detected
The fundamental strength with e-mail is there is not a lot of friction in sending it.
I'd love to see both Microsoft and Yahoo driven completely out of the email business entirely. That would reduce spam quite a bit.
So let's all write letters to both companies and encourage them to refuse to connect either way with anyone not buying in to their extortion scheme.
I think the best way is to just have people handle spam filtering in their own ways, at the client level. Adaptive spam filtering is available in several e-mail clients, and it works very well while annoying very little people.
However, I know that some people still have dialup and they'd still have to download all the spam before filtering it.
I wonder how great of a chance this has of becoming policy, considering that one of the individuals quoted with a disparaging remark in the article, David Farber, is considered the grand father of the Internet as well as serving as the Chief Technologist for Federal Communications Commission.
There already is a solution... It is called a digital signature and comes from a Certificate Authority. Couldn't ISP's, Yahoo, or even Hotmail be required to issue PKI certificates to a paying user? Email administrators would then have the option of dropping any email that wasn't digitaly signed (as coming from a legitimate CA). This digital signature would shed light on the responsible parties involved in sending SPAM. Then fines could be levied on the guilty parties. Screw the stamp people. I already pay for the privilage of sending email. Digital Signatures are free!
gllshhht...
The reason we have spam is because it is pretty much free to send.
We have lots of real junk mail, but imagine if every mom and pop store, kid and porn site could anonymously send a letter to everyone for FREE? You would be burried in letters.
The ONLY way to stop Spam is to make it too expensive for spammers to dend it. There are many ways to do this, some good, some bad, some work with others.
1. Charge.
Mail can be sent with a one-time key that allows the reciever to charge for the email.
Email boxes can be configured to allow whitlisted people in for free, allow anyone to send, or only allow paid mail.
Mailing lists and other bulk emailing needs can send all their mail out as no-charge. Nobody can force you to pay them.. but they don't have to read your email either.
This of course will only work with...
2. Authenticated mail servers. If we make it too time consuming for spammers to spam, we will stop the majority of it. Make them have to hack into an authenticated server before they can send. Still will not stop it, but will cut the flood way down.
3. Authenticated users. Even better. Now I know that when it says From: Friend@aol.com it really is them.
4. Expensive CPU computation. Make sending servers answer hard math questions. Downsides are people with Pentium 90's who run mailing lists get hit. But is it always a bad thing to make people with high usage pay for what they consume?
5. Let Microsoft or AOL set up a secret, closed source mailing system incompatable with the current SMTP methods and trust them to handle the spam and not destroy our privacy. No thanks.
6. Let the government handle all the email, making you use your SSN or some other unique identifier as an address. Not going to even touch this one.
There are plenty of other ways. Spam is now such a problem we need to impliment one or more of them. We have to make sure spammers PAY for every message somehow. Make it expensive in money, time or time served.
...as long as there's a way to send email "collect". If sending an email costs you 2 cents, you're not going to want to send out a list mailing to 30000. That's $600 per issue! However, if you can send each of those emails and have the recipient agree to pay the 2 cents, then there's no problem. Of course, then you need to prevent spammers from sending collect... Maybe have people wanting on your list pay 24 whole cents up front for a year's subscription? Idunno, seems like yet another 'net problem that could be overcome with micropayments.
All this is going to do is make email totally proprietry and over complex. It will mean banding about digital cirtificates and various payment methods - (probably controlled by microsoft) just to send a simple email the length of this post. But something most people will probably miss is that if two people know eachother then they will just have their email addresses on a "safe" list in their email client and theres no reason they would need to use the payment system.
If your going to make email more complicated i dont see any reason to use a payment based system over a challenge-based system - eg: you send an email to someone for the first time, their server or client sends back an email with a human test (eg type a number from a graphic, answer a simple random question such as "if mary had a little lamb what animal did mary have?" or ask them the name and gender of the person they are emailing) the advantage being that its not a central system, its not complicated, it only needs to be done once, and it can be set/edited/tweeked by the user.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
If their email to prevent spammers is going to be as good as their security on their boxen, why bother. There will be a work around in less than a week, and the spammers will have a bonus of getting a whole of new email address's. We really need an open and free organisation that has nothing to gain, to design a new mail system. The current one is becoming useless.
All the spam I get I have been forwarding to the FTC. I wonder if they are doing the investigations like they said they would? Dan
If Yahoo and MS start charging for emails they will immediately loost the title of being the largest. Heck probably 90% of their addresses are just fill mailboxes anyway.
I can't see why they would even consider such a thing knowing the internet is too strong to give in. People dont even want to pay for what already costs money, why would they pay for what is currently free?
I would not currently pay to end my spam problem.
Well, it does save the inconvenience of having to also solve the small issue of having to come up with a microbilling system. However, it *still* does nothing for legitimate senders of bulk mail. While a big corporate might have no problems throwing hardware at the solution, I'm sure the non-profit operators of lists for open source projects and charities etc. might not like the idea as much.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
When have you ever known Microsoft to do the solution that exists. Has anyone checked to see if Yahoo or Microsoft got a patent on the whole stamp idea?
Evolution or ID?
Just because it's on the Internet doesn't make it free. Operating an e-mail server costs money, you have to plug it into a wall and we all know power isn't free. You also have to plug it into a computer network, and we all know those aren't free. You also have to plug that network into an Internet connection, and we all know those aren't free either.
It's the fact that e-mail has no per-message unit of charge that makes it appear free, and why e-mail lists you want to be on are so cheap to operate, and spam you don't want to get is so cheap to throw at you. It's hard to raise the cost of one without raising the cost of the other.
However, e-mail lists can simply convert to a pull-based mechanism such as a web page or RSS... so I think e-mail list operators who shout down anti-spam measures that interfere with their current operations are just being lazy, they can convert their subscribers to other delivery methods if they want to.
See my history of posts and you will see that I frequently post about spam
Sounds to me like you're a spammer.
I hate you people and your kind, with your Nigerian business man this and your you've got a small penis that, you make me sick.
In fact you not only make me sick, but you make Jesus cry. CRY DAMNIT!!
Now Jesus is a nice boy and he doesn't deserve to cry. Oh no, Jesus does not deserve to cry, especially over an evil and wicked spammer such as yourself.
You deserve to be hunted down and had bad, wicked and nasty things done to you.
You evil spammer you.
"The very notion that I have to get permission to send you a marketing message doesn't make sense and is not good public policy," said Richard Gingras, Goodmail's chief executive.
The nerve of this guy. When it costs me money (read "bandwidth"), it requires my permission.
Challenge-response and Sender Permited systems are all that will ever work. When the spammer's get a 99% bounce rate you'll see the economics that drive them cause the spam to taper down to zero.
My favorite is MailWasher Pro. I bounce ALL unsolicited spams (300+ a day from several accounts total) and after a month it's already starting to taper off as they see that these addresses are "bad".
The reason we have spam is because it is pretty much free to send.
Bzzzt! Wrong. Thanks for playing.
99% of the reason we have spam is because authorities don't enforce the existing laws already on the books that these spammers violate. Breaking into innocent peoples' computers and repurposing foreign network resources are illegal in almost every jurisdiction, but the authorities have yet to demonstrate they have an interest or method of catching these crooks. Once they do, you'll see this problem drop off considerably.
Experience has shown that those who say "simply replace SMTP" do not understand the nature of the problem. It's no coincidence that one of the symptoms of being an anti-spam kook is that your solution involves replacing SMTP
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
The solution is out. It's called authentication. It is used in a source forge project called Tagged Message Delivery Agent, and by a for profit company called mailblocks.com. It's simple, it works
-Nuke the moon
How much is the sender paid?
Other than time, the cost to a recipient for a single message is on the order of $.00001, or about a million emails for ten dollars.
If you make the price signifigantly higher than that, you encourage recipients to game and the system to recieve email because they are renumerated far in excess of the actual costs to deal with it. (See the problems in the US with telco 'settlement fees' for related work.)
Yet, if you make the price at $10/million messages, thats not going to impact spam that much --- roughly double the price for sending it.
Something like XNS. Imagine if every connection to your computer (on any port and for any reason) was automatically involve an exchange of terms and conditions. Imagine, a spammer wants to send you an email, first he or she would have to agree to the terms of your computers automatic policy of accepting unsolicited commercial email. You could make your policy require a payment from the sender of $10 (for example). Any spammer who does not accept your terms is automatically rejected. If the spammer makes the connection and agrees to your terms but then renegs on them, you now how a documented route to go after them in court.
Of course I know the answer to this, it's called change the nature of email. Which is a subtle way of saying let's move everyone to a new set of protocols/services that we could control so we can make them pay for their spamming...
If you're going to go to those lengths, just redo the protocol without the new tax. Make it harder to send forged email.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
(Apologies to those who have seen this before.)
Your company advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(x) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
except the spammer will send out 1 piece of spam, and somebody else system will be doing the actuall spamming.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The paradox this solution hit is as follows...
If somebody can afford to send a mail list to X many people Y times a week, then that'll be the same price as sending a spam message to X many people Y times a week.
If you set the computational price too high, you've killed all mailing lists, and set it too low and and spam will still exist...
The REASON we have spam is because some stupid people are BUYING the CRAP the spammers are selling.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
Instead I advocate that the mail server require of the sender to do a brute force cracking of an encrypted message that takes 30-40 seconds per recipient.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
this one is even more stupid than M$ solution of the server sending an "expensive" equation to the client to solve before it sends a message.
... now what would it take for the government to "tax" mail ... well, they'd have to know how much mail was sent ... so, they'd have to route ALL MAIL. hello. lets all change the MX records for our domains to point to mail.postoffice.gov ... ha ha ha ha. whew. nevermind the "paranoid" ramifications of having all your email routed thru a government network ... but how much would THAT system cost the taxpayers? insane i say.
... whats to keep any individual from firing up their own copy of sendmail and bypassing the whole deal? i know ... a government body could intercept and monitor all internet protocl traffic pointed at port 25! well, what if my firewall portmaps internal 25 to external 10025 ... and my "destination" firewall portmaps external 10025 to internal 25? i know! that same government body could intercept and monitor ALL internet protocol traffic EVERYWHERE! ha ha!
... lets say that all that monitoring and enforcement stuff works ... but i want to get an email from my buddy in canada? or korea? now who pays what to whom? whats to keep the intelligent programmer community from then developing a different, more secure, mail protcol ... thus making obsolete all the infrastructure that was built for this half baked plan?
... wouldn't it be better to just START with a redesign of mail protocols? build checkpointing and accountability into the system from the beginning? keep the old mail and new mail systems completely separate ... anybody running a gateway between old & new systems would thus become accountable for all traffic originating from the gateway. sure you'd have a period of time during transition where things might get a little chaotic, but you could always run 2 mail clients until all your contacts get onto the new system. surely there is some IETF committee working on this.
... 10yr old child in front of computer turn to call over his shoulder, "Daddy! I've got another penis enlargement mail!! Make it stoooooooooppp...". Father figure pans into the picture, "No problem, son! I've just signed up for NewMail! It looks the same as your old mail, but without all the spam!"
rule #1) you can't tax a frikkin internet protocol. why, you ask? because there IS NO FRIKKIN WAY TO REGULATE IT!
lets assume this "email tax" were implemented in the US. what kind of infrastructure would it take? the job of taxation would either fall on the owner of the email server (highly improbably at best) or on the government
now lets just say that a working "revenue collection" system were in place
ok ok
wait
i can imagine the public service messages on tv even now
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
All that junk that lands up in your mailbox - grocery-store lists, coupons etc - somebody pays for all that. I'm sure it costs them a bit too. Still, it's delivered.
So what makes them (Microsoft/Yahoo) think that a similar scheme will stop all spam. If the spammer has to pay for each email he sends, he'll recover his costs by charging the person who's product is advertised in the spam a little extra.
Think about it this way: what do you do if a neighbor incessantly follows you around talking about this or that service or product? Well, most people would ask the jerk to kindly shut up. But if this only encourages the neighbor, then it would be logical to get a restraining order. If the neighbor violates the restraining order, then s/he goes to jail.
So, why can't we apply this to all forms of unrequested solicitaiton? Why can't we just make it a criminal offense to badger someone (or several someones indiscriminately) with wasteful spam, mailings, phone calls, faxes, pager spam, etc.?
I think that the usual answer is that you can't arrest a corporation, and that it's even harder to impose penalties on an international corporation. My solution to this is rather radical: allow corporations to be criminally tried for infractions against the law. If they lose the case, they can appeal, but if they lose the appeal (or if they don't appeal), then those responsible should be arrested and punished (by fines, community service, or jail time; the usual means) according to the crime and their participation in it. A major spam corporation might then be effectively broken up; it would certainly put some more teeth into the laws and regulations regarding corporations.
As for multinational corporations... well, there do exist precidents and systems by which nations cooperate to track down and arrest criminals. It would be no more complex than it already is, but would take more manpower.
There are some oddities involving tax laws in the US which deal with all of this, but I'll let someone else who knows that subject better than I explain it, or leave it to the individual slashdotter to research it on their own.
~UP
Eat the Path.
However, the people asking how we'll collect from the spammers didn't RTFA. You pay *first* by buying the stamp from the third party (and presumably get refunded for any mail that doesn't go through).
Yes, they could, theoretically, scam credit card numbers (assuming there weren't an escrow period for volume buys, which is sure how I would set it up), but if anything has the slightest chance to get them stomped for good, stealing from Visa is it.
Damn Bastards, you killed email.
I am sick and tired of a select few companies proposing things that only intrest them.
If all ISP or individuals who run mail servers would configure them to authenticate a user before allowing them to send mail would take care of just as much spam as what they are proposing to do.
The spam you aren't going to stop in either method will be comming from infected microblow(M$) machines.
If such a postage scheme takes off all reply after me,
"Do not send any mail to user on systems the abide by this system."
If everybody stops sending mail to users on these systems it will die a horable death!
Enough said!
Right, start charging to send an email when it's the ISP and end user who actual brunt the cost of transport.
I think not. US Postage is accepted because a real service is provided and required on behalf of the US Postal service to deliver mail.
On eMail, there is in fact no interaction on behalf of the US Postal service or any other government agency required to deliver the electronic message.
As well, this will hardly stop spam - in fact it will give spam the foundation it needs to legitimize itself as a corporate business model. Granted, spam will become slightly more tolerable with regards to the 'amount' of spam - however spam messages will begin to contain massive amounts of information rather then quick and small advertisements.
Regardless, the internet will not tolerate such useless regulation - and email would quickly be replaced by alternate forms of [free] communication(s).
We don't need taxation, we need representation. We pay enough taxes already. It's time for the government to step up and pass legislation that recognizes the need to prevent illegal and unwanted communication(s) on the internet.
Sure, we all want a free internet - but directing [unwanted] communication to specific users repeatedly should be a crime. Once a user declares they do not wish to receive [spam] messages from the sender - that should be the end of it. To continue further [spam] communication(s) should in fact be a criminal offense.
These same practices take a roll in physical solicitations and telephony solicitations. If a person wishes to not have physical solititations - they simply post a [no soliciting] sign at their residence or place of business. Likewise, we have the national 'do not call' registry to prevent unwanted telephony solicitations. As well, there are very strict laws to prevent the unwanted transmission of [soliciting] fax documents.
All forms of solicitation are [proposedly] banned at the users request under the idea that such communications present a legitimate cost to the user.
Email solicitation is in fact no different. The burdon of cost is in fact extended to the user in the form of time, bandwith, and hardware/software resources required to receive and dispose of such [unwanted] communication(s).
I, personally, receive over 40,000 [unwanted] messages per month.
This is after years of preventative measures. There is simply nothing a user can do to stop [unwanted] email, aside from relocating their email address. In which case, it is sitll only a matter of time before their address(es) are aquired and distributed among spam groups.
We have a constitutional right to protect ourselves and our family. Spam is in fact a real threat to many of us. It imposes real costs and has real reprocussions. Future legislation must recognize that threat, and allow [victimized] end users to seek judgement for damages caused to them.
It's a pitty, really, that politicians are so uneducated about technology. Had they the slightest incling, this problem would have been delt with along with the national do not call registry.
One day, though, we will in fact prevail -- and spammers will be spending their time behind bars - far from the likes of any technology. They are criminals, 80 year old woman or not. They are taking from others to benefit themselves. Many of them perform hanus criminal acts to further improve their [spam] operation(s).
So to all spammers, I would say; Our time will come, and so will yours. Be ready, we are.
The problem with all these anti-spam "solutions" is that they treat the symptom, and not the cause.
The current email protocol is seriously broken. It was invented back in the day when the internet was an infant, and everybody knew one another. That day is long gone, but we're stuck with the same old protocol like some dismal 70's TV rerun.
We need a protocol that expects the very worst of each and every email, and plans for it.
The Open Source community fights tooth and nail over whether KDE or Gnome belongs in UserLinux! When is everyone going to start fighting at least as hard for a new email protocol that solves this (and the virus attachment) problem?
Charging a fee for email is a typical M$ solution: patch the problem to shut the complainers up, while maintaining the same old flawed system, and in the end, solving nothing at all.
With all the sys admins or whatnot trying to figure out which IPs are truly responsible and the huge efforts they exert to find the guilty party or machine, why doesn't anyone talk about the basic follow the money method?
You may have legislation to put spammers in jail or levy huge fines on them, but first you have to find them. That is easy. All law enforcement has to do is:
1. Pretend to be a vendor that wants to advertize via spam. You'll have to write a check to pay them and then that's it. You have the classic sting operation.
2. The spam advertizes a store, so figure out the store and pay them or write to them or supoena them with the question "Who did you pay to send all those emails?".
Follow the money folks. It isn't that hard. Why filter and chase when the spammers are already using compromised home PCs? They know about technology - but can they handle the long arm of the law? Presuming of course, that the law is interested in stopping spam.
I say let Microsoft and Yahoo go shake down it's customers for E-Stamp fees. Better yet, let them make the new protocol which they refer to as "caller id" proprietary and, only run on Microsoft products.
:)
This is just the break AOL needs to get back in the game. AOL can offer SPAM blockage without the fees. I am not a fan or proponent of AOL, but my point is that the market is going to quickly sort this out. I wish Microsoft and Yahoo all the best and hope they go full speed ahead with this plan. After all, taking something that's FREE and charging money for it in a down economy is brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! These companies must be full of MBA's from the finest schools. I wonder if I could be successful selling the FREE MSN CD's
While MSFT and Yahoo are inventing "caller id" for email. Maybe they could figure out if the email is "long distance", "intra-lata", or "near-zone". Next, they could invent a whole wacked out billing system just like SBC/Ameritech in which I can call across the country for 3 cents a minute, but calling outside of a 20 mile radius costs 10 cents a minute or more depending on the time of time. And there's another idea. Invent a rate plan based on the time of day the email is sent. What if you use a laptop? Will there be email roaming charges!? The possibilities are limitless. Go get'em boys, put those MBA's to good use, just don't expect a check from me, but do send me a copy of your rate plan so I can laugh!
The ONLY way to stop Spam is to make it too expensive for spammers to send it.
I agree with you, however I think the best way to do this is make spammer's "costs" involve BAIL MONEY and CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYERS FEES!
Sigh. From the article:
>"The very notion that I have to get permission to send you a marketing
>message doesn't make sense and is not good public policy."
I dunno. I feel like the very notion that marketers should be allowed to cram advertising into the email boxes of anyone they feel like, without regard for the costs borne and time lost* by the individuals and ISPs at the receiving end, doesn't make sense and is not good public policy. I guess it depends on who you think the public is -- the masses as individuals, or the masses as business owners and operators.
*I never really thought about the time lost, until I started administering a few extra domains with email addresses on a lot of spam lists. Even with direct access to the mail server over the LAN, it takes a surprisingly long time for thunderbird to rifle through the messages (via IMAP) to discard spamassassinated messages and apply the bayesian filtering to the rest. I can only imagine how horrific it must be for 56k modem users!
Charging will not work. Here's what will happen:
1) Start charging for SMTP sends.
2) New mail protocol to avoid charges becomes widely adopted.
3) Spammers learn to use the new protocol.
4) Repeat the above, ad infinitum (until a new protocol requires sender identity - public keys?).
IOW, the money may spur new protocols, but won't prevent spam. If we're smart we'll just short-circuit this process and move to a new protocol while keeping things free.
[Please exuse me if this is what the article is about, I didn't feel up to sacrificing my first male child to the Times.] The newsletter for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics has an interesting article about postage. from the article (link goes to page with link to PDF Read "Math 1, Spam 0")
The Penny Black Project instead uses "proofs of work," a concept first introduced in 1992 by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor of the IBM Almaden Research Center. The idea is simple: "If I don't know you, you have to prove to me that you spent ten seconds of CPU time just for me, and just for this message," says Dwork, who now works at Microsoft Research. For legitimate senders, spending ten extra seconds to send an e-mail message is no problem. Most of the time, you spend more time than that simply composing the message. But for spammers, those ten seconds are the kiss of death. The one thing that no one can steal is more seconds than there are in a day. For a single computer, the CPU time available in a day amounts to 86,400 seconds; a spammer who wanted to put electronic postage on millions of messages would thus need hundreds of computers. Dwork is betting that most spammers cannot afford that kind of expense. Spam costs almost nothing for a spammer to send, but a recipient who looks at the message and manually deletes it incurs a perceptible cost in lost time.
if I attach a jpeg of a stamp to my mail? Will that work? Actually I believe that they just want to eliminate anonymous mail and access to the 'net. Luckily for us, somebody will always offer free, anonymous mail, until it is outlawed.
What?
Once, registering domains was free too :(
... Because there will be a mass migration to some other protocol, myself included. If everyone stops using SMTP, it becomes an unattractive way in which to post ads.
How do you define "email?" IMs and SMTP both serve much the same function, and the only real difference is that IMs are designed for near-instantaneous delivery. Does that make IMs email? What about CGI-based contact forms that deliver directly to a POP3 box? It has the same effect as an email, so is it email? If SMTP is taxed then people will move away from it and start using more non-traditional message delivery services. You would have to tax the whole internet to tax "email."
I am not willing to pay to send email messages, and (as always) the spammers will move out of jurisdiction and continue spamming for nearly-free.
At our school, we don't earn a degree when we graduate—we earn pi/180 radians
hey -- you are welcome to filter your port 25 traffic any time you like.
if people can't even keep their windows boxes updated, how do you expect to enforce isps blocking port 25?
YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM
There are dozens of "great" ways to solve the spam problem, this may or (more like) may not be one of them. But the real problem is finding a migration path away from the current system to any new "fixed" system.
During the transition period, users will either have to accept e-mail from the old SMTP system, or refuse it. If they accept it, why would anyone move to the new system when they are still going to get spam via SMTP? If they refuse it, why will anyone move to the new system when it means they anyone still using SMTP (which at the start, will be virtually everyone) will be unable to e-mail them?
If we could say, "OK, from Jan 1st 2005, SMTP is gonna be switched off and everyone will use the new system", there wouldn't be a problem, but obviously we can't do that.
Or we could somehow stop spam from SMTP getting to accounts on the new system. But then, if we could do that, we could presumably use exactly the same technique to fix SMTP.
... does anyone know how to authenticate a user *without* email? We get users from hotmail all the time saying they could not register because they never got the email.
Bob has bitch tits.
If we are going to pay postage, we must have some electronic way of doing that. It could be creditcard or something else. Whatever it is you will have to be able to do payments through your computer. That will probably include som account information et.
What an admirable target for viruses, trojans or spyware that would be. The relatively small problem of using e-mail filters to prevent your inbox from clogging up will be replaced with the bigger problem of keeping your money in the wallet.
A better way would probably be to only accept digitally signed mails, that way the sender could always be identified, and if spam was illegal in most countries we would be able to prevent spam with legal processes.
The problem is that there could be legitimate use of anonnymous mail. E.g. who would send an e-mail to the press telling that their company is doing an Enron to the press or even the police if they knew they could be identified.
But I think its easier to learn to live with this disadvantage, than to loose the money in your wallet. After all wistle blowers could still slip a paper note into an unmarked envelope and slip it under the doorstep of the reciever.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Asking the sender to process a quick math question seems a better solution to me.
Ok Einstein, how would the marketing department send emails?
this is an attempt to create a cash cow.
Spammers are going to remain anoymous and will not get billed. It's the average joe that will line Microsoft's pockets.
Tell me this: If a hacker is able to hack into a mail server running Microsoft exchange and email out millions of emails because of Microsoft's buggy insecure software, will Microsoft pick up the postage or will the poor fool who trusted Microsoft's products?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
We have had a solution to the SPAM problem. It has been there for many many years but we fail to make use of the resources available. Think it through. Instead of a "Email tax" merely set up a nice PayPal account we coudl all donate to for a organization based in some nebulous unknown 3rd world country. This organization, preferably with a cool 4 letter acronym based name, could then higher such people as retired SAS officers, unemployed KGB operatives, Columbian Cartel hit men out of work, Balkan Mercenaries...you get the idea.... These noble souls could then isolate and identify spam generators and.... "007 Begin Data Purge" Sometime in the future, the simple, gentle mementos of this organization (a collection of not more then 30 mummified right thumbs gathered in the performance of their solemn duty) will be a reminder to the world community that it is fare kinder to converse, then to be perverse... --
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Doesn't it just come down to killing the easy anonymity of email? If the whole system was run in a secure fashion, then it would be child's play to sue the pants off a few high profile spammers and put the whole bunch of them out of business. And blacklists would actually be useful.
Of course it requires a major conversion of the ol' SMTP, but with a huge amount of power concentrated in AOL, MSN, and Yahoo, I think they could come up with a secure email alternative and force everyone to upgrade. It would be painful for a bit, but in the long run I bet it would be better.
I'm all for anonymity in general, but not in my inbox. Post to a discussion or something through an anonymizer if you want that.
Cheers.
I'm not going to pay for e-mail just because spam has taken over the internet. I MUCH rather set up filters and reduce my spam down to trickle before I am going pay for sending e-mail, that would be the dumbest thing ever and completely mess up the exchange of ideas we now have thanks to the internet. Unless all service providers covered the charge I'm fully against it.
Have fun, =Otto(matic)
Every time I've read about this proposal so far it has been about making the sending relay do a little extra processing by solving a simple puzzle rather than asking somebody to fork over a few cents.
The idea is that if it takes you some extra time to bulk mail you will need more hardward and more processors to do it. The algorithm I read about was using memory content movement through the bus rather than straight processor cycles, i.e. buying a faster processor does immediately reduce the amount of time it takes to solve the "sending puzzle".
No doubt Google will help you find the original article, it was only about a week ago when it was on the BBC news site.
Email postage might make sense if the the government of every internet-enabled country in the world were to accept and enforce this taxation equally, or if we had a single world government.
But that's just a small detail...
This is the URL to the original BBC story - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3324883.stm
Not having a NYT account I don't know if this is directly related or not. Seems that it needs some airtime anyway.
I get in excess of 50 spams per day in Yahoo.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The idea may work, but I'm not in favour. I like email, I like that it's free, and it means I rarely have to use snail mail / faxes.
One thing though - if Microsoft or Yahoo are approached by a company offering to pay for a bulk... er..., promotional mail sending spree, will they accept? I mean, if they are in it for the money like some of the posts on this topic suggest then maybe they can work in a reduced rate for known (high paying businesses) spammers?
This may be nothing more than my own paranoia kicking in, but...
Micro$platt has a long and colorful history of buying out (or attempting to buy out) their competition. If said competition refuses a buyout, the usual result is a hostile takeover of some form or another.
I think Billy-boy and 'UncaFester' Ballmer would love to "own" E-mail. However, it's such an open application (SMTP) that the only way they could come up with to "own" it is to come up with their own system of electronic postage.
This business of "ending spam in two years" is nothing more than a smokescreen. Our legislators already had the perfect chance to, if not end spam, and least put a big dent in it by BANNING IT OUTRIGHT. Did they take the chance? Nooooo. Not with their puppet masters in the DMA breathing down their collective necks.
It would have been a no-brainer to extend the junk FAX law to cover E-mail as well. Along those lines, I've often wondered what part of 'No!' it is that telemarketdroids and spammers Just Don't Understand.
Anyway... This is nothing more than Billy-boy's attempt to "own" something that he really can't. I predict the entire effort will end in utter disaster of a public-relations nature.
And the worst part is that I don't think it'll have the slightest effect on the spam problem. Nothing will, until legislators are brave enough to recognize where the private property lines are on the Internet, and subsequently say "No, spamming is NOT legal. Period."
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
not if users can set certain servers as no-challenge, that way the recieving machine simply asks the mailserve "did you send this?"
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
What's crass and pure outrage is the fact that CBS refused to display that ad about the federal deficit from www.moveon.org ... I think people should be more worried about _that_!
Use a different port for initial mail submission. In other words, accept mail from the outside world to your users on port 25 (the standard port for MTAs to communicate). Obviously, you are already doing this. For mail from your users to the outside world (or other users, for that matter), use port 587 (submission) or even better, port 465 (smtps) with SSL or TLS for security. Now none of your users have to worry about ISPs blocking egress port 25 traffic (a practice I support, as it fixes many other problems in addition to spam-- such as Windows viruses).
SMTP+SSL+AUTH is better than POP before SMTP, now that most clients support AUTH. The trick is setting it up, see these tips for more advice:
http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/auth.html
http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/starttls.html
http://www.sendmail.org/compiling.html
(obviously, these tips are for Sendmail, but other MTAs can be similarly configured).
Here i am with loads of money burning in my pocket, what will i do? Why not spend it on a scam portraying to be about fighting spam but really is an attempt to tax email?
Anyone with half a brain will be very reluctant to give the power of email delivery to Microsoft as little as we have been keen to give them the key to the internet (MS Passport). Giving them that kind of power for free is like giving a bankrober a better gun -"here, please rob me again!"
What is there to assure us that MS dosnt sign an agreement with someone for discounts on large quantities of "informational email"?
Another very big reason is that spamming is not going to be solved this way. Lets say i have an account and someone uses the latest hole in Longhorn/whatever and steals my account? What about thousands of accounts? I cant really see any way to remove spam without seriously crippling email as we have learnt to love it.
The only real long term solution is to take away the incentive to send spam, the money pouring in from mindless companies paying for spam. Why not solve the root of the problem instead of creating a new market for MS and Yahoo?
HTTP/1.1 400
If every user or at least every server had a key and we all signed each others keys creating a web of trust and only accepted signed and trusted mail the spam problem would be solved. I really dislike the way SSL certificates are handed out. A central CA is a very bad idea due to the cost and browser lock-in issues etc. With GPG and web of trust if you want to run a mail server you need to talk to a friend who is already running one and get them to sign your key. Perhaps we could even use DNS to propagate and cache the keys and sigs. If you sign a key that turns out to be a spammer you better revoke that signature fast before the person upstreeam from you revokes yours. Problem solved. Now if only we could get the big guys to go along with it...
As soon as money comes into the equation for email, only an absolute idiot is going to thank that the government isn't going to start taxing it!
Supporting micro payments is simply going to be another form of tax revenue. Not only does this plan make zero sense, but I certainly don't want to have to pay to email AND pay taxes on it too! I already pay for my DSL connection. I pay for my hardware. I pay for my time. I don't want to have to pay again, for everything I've already paid for.
The short line of idiots is over there! No thanks...I'm going elsewhere.
Charging for email (postage) will only insure that all email is spam as the average user wont send email but the spammers who are making money will be happy. It will Legitmize their buisness, and they will just incure another buiness expense which they will pass along to their clients. This has to be the worse Idea have heard in a while. The real solution to the spam problem lays in two areas. First stopping spoofing and forceing people to own up to where email comes from thus making filtering rules trival to implment. The second way to stop spam is to punish the people that use it. All of the fly by night websites that sell porn, herbal vigra.. and mortages should be put on an FTC hit list and punished publically to teach others that 'viral marketing' is really a virus that will snap back and kick your ass for unleashing it.
It's the same ridiculous concept as the RIAA is pushing. There's not enough "friction" currently so let's make it harder and more expensive to use so that it will cut down on "spam." Obviously the end result is that ordinary people pay more and have less freedom to use the technology.
i will never understand how someone can use an email-provider who doesn't offer pop3 or forwarding... wonder if those people are even crazy enough to pay for it
What about mailing lists? I'm on numerous mailing lists, some of which have thousands of users. How do you combat spam and not stop legitimate mass mailings?
Also, as far as charging people for sending email, what about all the hijacked machines out there? Granted, it would certainly give an incentive for people to patch their machines. Finally, all ISPs would have to approve it. If one ISP, to attract customers, says unlimited free email, they might get a lot of people who legitimately send a lot of email as well as spammers. What about foreign countries? How would you get countries like China, Korea, or Russia to do this?
I think the only technical solutions are white lists and some form of user authentication. However, authentication can also cause problems, especially if an ISP blocks outbound port 25 connections. For example, I have several domain names and I use various email addresses in order to block spam. I have one email address where I never receive spam because I only use it for personal communications or emails to people I know for sure will not spam me. I never use it for mailing lists since spammers frequently spider web sites that archive messages. I also never publish it on my web site.
However, no matter what email address or domain I use for sending mail, I have my mail server forward everything through my ISP's mail server.
If my ISP decided to only allow the email address they assigned me and they blocked outbound port 25 then I could not send any email with a different from and/or reply-to address. I also send email with my work address when working from home.
I think if something like California's spam law went into effect nationwide, it could do a lot to stop spammers. Even though most spam appears to come from China or other foreign countries, most of the companies sending the spam are right here in the US.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
What if I get a Virus that sends a million emails from my account - much bigger damage if sending the email costs something.
I don't think security mechanisms exist yet that could prevent that scenario.
If they can forge a header they can forge the postage.
Come on, the spammer has already shown an low regard for the law anyway.
The dumb idea = 1 cent per e-mail...
The smart idea = Reject all spam with no PGP signature.
The current idea = A "White list" and "Black list"
Mix it up:
If you match one of the above conditions your e-mail is sent:
If your a known goodguy such as eBay (or Microsoft.. ug) then you get on the global white list... (Requires a sizeable deposit)
If your willing to provide absolute certanty that you are who you clame to be (PGP) you also get through.
If your not willing (or able) to do eather then you get to pay...
Spammers will play around with this.. Some will fork over the 1 cent... untill they realise 2,000 e-mails means $200... You know that isn't much money really...
Spammers will go for the white list... Sizeable deposit revoked.. lawsutes... but that's kinda the way it works.
Spammers will PGP themselfs and that seams like the best idea becouse it's probably better if we can positively identify the spammer than if we make him pay becouse a lot of spam is criminal offering prescription drugs with out a prescription that sort of thing.
If I know Slashdot like I think I do.. and I'm cool with it if I'm wrong... But I think someone is going to say "Why bother with the dumb thing?"
It's quite simple: We have Windows, MacOs and the Posex famaly of operting systems (Ok MacOs is part of that & technicly WinNT can join too.. But not the point)
The dumb idea, the smart idea, the current idea.
We will always have that mix and it's important that people have the option open to them.
The dumb idea: Probably the easies way to go. A big headake in many ways but most people want a passive non-invasive non-committing pacage.
They want an easy way in and out.
Plug and play. Pay your quarter in the arcade instead of owning the cartrage.
The smart idea: Typlicly some sort of commitment is called for and it's not a simple one. An investment of time or money.. usually time. People don't want that unless they really understand what they are getting out of it.
Users will resent being forced to buy a game console or worse a whole computer just to play a stupid video game.
The current way: Or usually a tweek of the current way. Some happy middle ground that works well but not perfictly.
Game rentals. For a lot of people it's easy to slip into and go with.
Now as far as I'm conserned (and I know others will disagree.. and when that changes it's time to get paranoid..) in the os department the dumb, smart and currnt ideas are:
Dumb: Windows, Smart: MacOs, Current: Posix...
For the record I've gone Posix..
I don't actually exist.
I have a solution, When a person sends an email, the email server recieving the email will generate a response and in the response it will have an image that has letters and numbers. The person then has to send another email and in the subject of the email you have to put the generated text. And you make the image so hard to read that computer ocr software can't read it clearly. So once the server recieves that second email with the code in the subject it allows the first email to go through. It's kinda a pia but it would elminate some of the spam because if a spammer sends out 30,000 emails then that means they would actually have to send out 60K with the correct codes.
to create a market for subcription based/free e-mail.
Fine MS and Yahoo and whoever else, be retarded. I'm not going to dump Mercury Mail just so I can micropayment people to death. I'll happily take your pissed off customers and I'm sure most other e-mail servers will do the same.
There are already dozens of free ways to communicate with people over the internet. If your "solution" involves invading my privacy or my pocket book, you need to remove your head from between your legs and see if you can come with an actual solution now that oxygen is reaching your brain.
Everyone, including the spammers are going to flock to the easiest and cheapest ways to communicate. You need to deal with the problem not just try to hide it under a pile of money and/or regulations.
It's pathetic how many people think sacrificing liberty for safty is a bad idea but when it comes to sacrificing privacy and money over spam, that's somehow a good idea.
I'm perfectly content with the current system as I'm keeping spam down to a dull roar without caring about who sent the spam or charging senders.
Blocking port 25 is just going to result in people running their SMTP servers on another port. I already run mine on two ports. If 25 goes away, another will be standardized or RinetD's stock will go up as people will be forwarding as many ports as needed to keep the mail moving.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Maybe the answer doesn't lie in paying for e-mails, but for big companies (Microsoft, ISPs, Yahoo!) to stop selling e-mail lists to those damned spammers.
Oh, sure, you have the web bots and fake sign up forms and what have you, but I bet if some law was passed (that punished heavily and was inforced heavily as well) that made it illegal to sell a person's e-mail address without their prior knowledge of exactly who it is going to, things would dry up.
At the very least, make it so that if a company does sell someone's e-mail, that person gets some kind of reimbursment for now having to waste their time guessing is an e-mail is spam or not.
With some IM clients you could set up a challenge system for people who aren't on your buddy list. But guess what? You find out that you have to deal with more or less the same issues as when trying to stop spam in e-mail.
Paying for email is seen as a way to stop spam by many.
What all of those forget5 is that it also takes away the one big reason why people use email instead of fax, even when that means having to scan and manipulate pictures instead of just throwing a sheet of paper on a machine.
IT WILL NEVER WORK
As soon as such an idea is introduced and normal email is hindered, peopel will setup alternatives.
I do like Yahoo's idea to sign messages at the originating server, esp. when combined with DNS info that tells which hosts are allowed to deliver mail from a domain.
This idea however is stupid and is bound to make email even less usable then it is today due to the spam, just forget it,
Advantages: real email stays free, spam costs, microtransaction standards emerge.
Disadvantages: Microsoft and Yahoo don't make as much money. Sorry.
mt
I'm not an ISP, but that doesn't mean my company's mail servers don't receive a significant volume of mail. Last month, the incoming mail servers for our 5,000 or so employees rejected 11 million spams with a SpamAssassin score >= 10. If we had instead accepted those emails, and received a penny for each of them, my department would have brought in $110,000 in revenue for the last month, just for turning off the spam filter.
Sounds like a plan.
Edith Keeler Must Die
If there was going to be a charge for email, consider how one group of email users, namely universities, would react. First, they'd find a workaround/new protocol so internal "messages" wouldn't be charged for. Next, universities would find a way to exchange "messages" between each other without charges. Then others would pick up on the idea and ...
There are technical solutions, but they won't be adopted until a certain pain threshold is reached. Spam filters have improved a lot lately and have been holding the pain down. Charging for email would ratchet the pain level up immensely.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
The REASON we have spam is because some stupid people are BUYING the CRAP the spammers are selling.
Really? How's your penis doing these days?
You don't know anything about spamming if you believe what you're saying.
If spamming really was effective, there would be a lot more legitimate companies doing it, but there aren't, and there's a reason for it. It's really only economically viable if you can do it en masse and it's relatively cheap. The vast majority of spamming promotions are strictly commission-based. If people really were buying a lot of these products, that wouldn't be the model spam-promoting companies would employ.
Microsoft partners with Yahoo, with the greater goal of crushing Google.com, and returning Yahoo the #1 search engine ranking (as powered by msn.com).
I for one, certainly hope that google releases a mail service SOON. By doing so, they'll pre-emt the forthcoming Microsoft strike. Furthermore, if they do it right, they can easily become the #1 mail system AND kick MSFT back a few steps in the process.
But what do I know - I'm just a slashdot-reading-msn-bigot and I don't want no stinking google corrupting my great msn.com search results!
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
There are ways to get spammers: a) make it a felony. One spam, one month in the pen, with Bubba. With the amount sent in one spam run, we can be pretty sure the person will never spam again. b) make sure that any country harboring spammers gets cut off the internet if they do not deliver the spammers to the country of the first person charging them with spamming. c) do the same with people that buy from spammers.
> Since most spammers use invalid return addresses
...as I've seen with TMDA.
They _do_ use valid return addresses. Mine, for one.
>
Yes, I'm seeing more and more of that crap, along with the bogus bounces and "You have a virus" warnings.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Simple. "Legitimate" mailing lists would be Yahoo Groups. All others would be SOL.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm drowning in spam, and it's getting in the way of my job. The only solution that can possibly work is one that involves putting a price tag on spam. So here's my proposal (which I've put on here before, btw; this is not a new topic). The only way to put a price tag on spam is to put a price tag on email. But it doesn't have to apply to all email.
The price, then, is for the right to touch MY mailbox IF you're a stranger -- if you're a mailing list that I've subscribed to, you would go onto my whitelist, and come in postage-free. If you are somebody I know, you go onto my whitelist, and come in postage-free. Yes, for this to work, there has to be some way for the POP server (NOT the client) to maintain per-user whitelists.
If you're not on my whitelist, you need to use a one-time "stampette", whose price would have to be high enough to discourage spammers, but low enough to not bother anybody worthwhile. I'm thinking around a quarter-cent per message, but it wouldn't be fixed by anyone in particular. These stampettes would be issued on a free-market basis, and anyone could set up a micropostage service, provided that the *recipient* whitelisted it. So if somebody were giving away stamps at, oh, a million per dollar, then spammers would use them, and those stamps wouldn't be on my whitelist. Again, it's a free market solution, no government intervention.
ISPs, in this scheme, should issue all subscribers a batch of stampettes (which mail clients would learn quickly to attach, if needed). A thousand for a quarter-dollar (or quarter-Euro) would be more than enough for a month, don't you think? How many strangers (or first-time correspondents) do you write to?
Also check-out the Mailbox Reputation Network, which can provide the infrastructure for doing this on a global scale.
Sorry that URL should be The Mailbox Reputation Network.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
isn't really just a server by server whitelisting system.
ie. a server you deal with each day would probable be asked an easy question.
a new server a hard question. the low load of hard questions as the user base builds up would be managable.
but the one off load of 1000 hard questions could be killer.
No need to appeal to old P166 boxes for a "won't work example". A top of the line Palm or iPAQ handheld, or a next generation smart mobile phone won't have sufficient CPU capacity to do heavy math. At least your P166 had an FPU. The average PDA doesn't. Heavy math in the SMTP client isn't really a solution either.
Cha ching!
got sig?
>The difference is that with my idea, all computers are blacklisted by default; only those servers who maintain a billing account with the receiving ISP are allowed to send mail to them
Do you have any idea how many ISPs, domains and email servers there exists in the world?
This is excactly the way X.400 mail worked and the reason why it did not (and never could have) scale up to the hundreds of millions users Internet email have.
What about all the spoofed emails that get bounced, or make it to recipients that appear to come from you when i really didnt...
.
So i get charged for something i have ZERO control over?
No I didn't RTFA, since I refuse to register. Information should be free...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why do solutions always have to cost money or put control is some company's hands? I call bullshit. So here, people, are your solutions to spam:
User-level: spamprobe, bogofilter, spamassassin and spambayes are all very effective statistical filters with bayesian components. Train them well and you will see next to 0 spam, with just about no false positives. I dare say these will filter mail better than a human could do visually.
Those statistical filters aren't scalable. Running a large ISP is more your thing? Then install DCC at your site and enable greylisting on top of it. This will catch nearly all your spam, and false positives are rather rare.
All this software is free and actively developed. There, I've just saved you from spam. Where's my 200 USD consulting fee?
I hadn't thought of that. I guess the proposal isn't all bad after all.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
However, there are millions of stupid people and they breed faster. It would cost you far more than email postage to even attempt to educate most of them, and you would probably fail anyway.
Dear Slashdot readers,
SCO has investigated a feature of Linux that allows you to send electronic email. This feature is violating the Intellectual Property of SCO. Please remove the ability to send and receive email from your operating system immediatly, or puchase a sending mail licensing fee for $500 per half a processor from SCO. More information on this issue can be found at http://www.sco.com/licenses/sendmail
Thank you,
SCO
How about this: every major ISP pays the FCC (or the equivalent in another country) a tax on the e-mail, this gets passed down to the users in various forms, usually with not much affect (.01/e-mail sent or recipient) thus big ISPs support spammers but the spammers have to foot the bill for the tax. Now to deal with the mailing list problem, one implements a tax free whitelist for the recievers so that legitimate newsletters are not taxed. What about non USA/western country e-mail you ask? well the user is always footing the bill for the e-mail therefore ISPs can give the user the choice of accepting the e-mail (and paying tax for it) or chucking it; I'm sure some enterprising ISP would provide discount services for corresponding with india or wherever to buisnesses. So to recap: ISPs make a little less money, government makes more, and the spam buisness model becomes moot because of costs.
I don't see the problem with limiting the # of emails form any given ip to 10000 an hour. This way, johnny-come-lately with his home brew email server can send email to his 30000 users in a few hours. They could even have a waiver for companies like m$n, yahoo, and dell. Or any other company who is adhering to opt-in ads. It would take a spammer forever to spam at that rate
Those are interesting, thank you for posting them.
Both, however, seem dependent upon having both sides of the conversation join. In the case of Mailbox Reputation Network, it seems to be a voucher-based (as in I vouch for you, a web of trust) system. In the case of sudonames, it seems to be a whitelist system, where non-members can't send mail to you.
If both were universal, they'd probably work, especially sudonames, because that seems to count the credits, making host-hijacking worthless (it would run out of credits, which wouldn't happen right away with MRN, as I see it). But if I joined sudonames today, random people trying to reach my sudonames address would get bounced.
But then any micropostage scheme could have that problem, even mine, though a whitelist would exempt recipients from needing credits (stampettes).
To whomever modd'ed this as Flamebait -- thank you for correct moderation!
I recently started getting spam that has nothing but random words. The subject lines are stuff like "RE: Lawn Move Over Sense"
The body is stuff like "wall patience gratis sense over never everywhere nixon seaside wallflower table quicksand sky blue..."
As usual it's addressed to fakename@ my domain
What's the point of such mail, other than to clog the web with really useless crap.
Getting v.iagra spam kind of makes sense, in a spammy kind of way, but these new things don't make any kind of sense at all.
Wrong. The reason we have spam is because spammers have convinced an infinitely large group of slimy/ignorant companies that stupid people are buying crap the spammers are selling.
A subtle difference.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
"If spamming really was effective, there would be a lot more legitimate companies doing it, but there aren't, and there's a reason for it."
Actually, there are plenty of legitimate companies using mass email for advertising... the problem is that they play by the rules and are therefore much more easily filtered out by spam-blockers and less often noticed than their shady counterparts. Furthermore, legit companies tend to target the audience better and can therefore send smaller mailing runs, so you don't notice them as 'spam' as much because they aren't completely off the mark if you happen to receive them.
My company generates a large portion of its sales leads from bulk email that some might call 'spam'. I can guarantee you that if there were a reasonable scheme in place, my bosses would happily pay to continue sending our bulk emails 'cause they bring in business.
The bottom line though is that we need a new, secure email standard that allows the sender to be reliably identified. We can keep it all free if there's a method in place for enforcing the current laws.
It's the worst idea to fight spam ever.
It's almost as bad as the methods of the most hated government body in Poland -- our version of IRS. When dealing with VAT deduction the law states, that you can deduct VAT only if the person that sold you goods really paid it.
The idea is that people will do IRS's job, checking if someone paid their VAT, so they would stay clean. In practice no one can really check and if someone cheats on his taxes, his customers are held liable and fined.
Now do the math and find out how this relates to this story. Only this time ``fining body'' won't be government, so there won't be any simple way to protest those bills.
You just gonna have to ``prove that you're not a horse''. In court.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
How about we reintroduce flogging? Or, for poetic justice -- the spammer will have to volunteer some time to the post office carrying by hand a fraction of the bandwidth he wasted, without being allowed to used motorized means. Plus, that gives you the possibility to run them over.
I believe I posted a solution to the spam problem a while back...
Please don't humanize the morons around me. It makes me very uncomfortable.
I find it funny that many folks on /. will complain about the NYTimes requiring you to set up a free account, but those same folks who call it "sacrificing my first male child" are willing to set up a free account on SlashDot.
I've had a NYTimes account for a long time. I get emails from them with news summaries every day. The email address I gave them has never been given to anyone else, and it's never received a piece of spam - just like the email address I gave to /. hasn't received any spam.
You're just bitching without any rhyme or reason.
This just punishes the relay, not the spammer. There's no guarantee that the owner of the relay box will notice, or do anything, just because their box is sluggish. Plenty of machines are already infected with worms, and nobody is fixing them; what if those worms were (instead of a pointless exercise in chaos) tools to identify available servers for spammers to use? (In fact one of the recent MyDoom worms is suggested to have this purpose.)
Take all the idle capacity of poorly protected servers on the 'net. That's the amount of processing power that spammers potentially have at their disposal to spend on solving little math problems. And note, it costs them nothing because they're somebody else's hardware on somebody else's bandwidth. As long as they don't completely exhaust the usefulness of each infected server, there will be plenty of folks who won't even notice that anything is wrong with their server, so they won't have any idea that they should try and fix it.
Why not reverse the model--you pay the send the mail and then the reciever can choose to reimburse you. I'd much rather bother with that then have to go through Penis Enlargment ads and bill spammers anyways.
That will almost certainly kill email as we know it.
Email is popular because it is free, charging for it will just cause it to die out.
Given how much everyone hates SPAM, why can't the authors of MyDoom do everyone a big favor and create a virus to do a DDoS against the true perpetrators of SPAM - all those Viagra sites that are PAYING the spammers to do their dirtywork?
Like other posters have said, you prevent limp users from clicking SPAM links, but you can prevent the links from working!
I'd gladly connect an unpatched (as if that made any difference) Windoze box directly to my cable modem if a MyDoom-Viagra virus hit the net.
How much do we whine and kvetch about catalogs, sweepstakes, and credit offers in our snailmail boxes? How irate are we at the endless flow of crappola spewing from our televisions and radios? And how incensed are we at a few viagra ads in our inboxes? Advertising of all kinds is here to stay, and there is no avoiding it, short of a Luddite/Amish rejection of all forms of modern communication. With a declining economy, a degraded environment, dangerous Moslem lunatics, and male pattern baldness to worry about, a couple dozen strokes of the [del] key a day doesn't seem like much of a problem, now does it?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
From the SPF FAQ:
In the words of Bill Cole, "if someone had figured out a way to do TCP spoofing against an arbitrary target on the Internet without compromising higher-value machines than the target as preparation, that capacity is itself so potentially valuable that using it to send spam would be silly.Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Yahoo needs to STFU. The first thing they should do to help fight spam is fix their open redirect scripts. Bah. Fools.
IMHO, the RFC822 standard can easily accomodate an efficient spam-prevention, simply by using some kind of password protection scheme. In the most simple implementation, there would simply be an encrypted password in the header, which has to match for the mail to be categorized as personal.
All it takes is that the addressbook of an email application needs to store passwords as well as the @ddresses of your friends. It would be very simple to implement in existing Open Source email programs, and would be most efficient for preventing spam. When sending an email, the program needs to encrypt the password and put it in the header. On the receiving end, the MUA would have to check the Password: field.
I realize there would be a slight problem sending an email to someone you don't know, you'd have to get hold of the password somehow, but that could be given in a .PNG file on a web page or something.
Incoming mail without a Password: field in the header could be directed into a separate mailbox -- thoroughly filtered for spam, of course!
Such a scheme could be put into motion in a matter of months, and would take the air out of Microsofts recent proclamation... ;-)
It's daydreaming by Microsoft and Yahoo. IT WON'T WORK. NEVER.
Beter get your software fixed, damned. Release secure OS. Forbid 25 port by default from simple box and point to one box of the ISP who can relay then all mail to outside.
IT is possible to stop spam with these tools what we have now. There just must be a admins who do that. Yes, Microsoft, people CAN'T ADMINISTRATE their own boxes if they don't have enough expierence, period. Your dream about non-admin world with Microsoft Windows all over the place is gone. Forever.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Microsoft taking a non-solution to a widely known problem 5 years after everyone else came up with it and turning it into a proprietary product they will no doubt force into their market using every dirty trick they can muster.
Eh, I should add I'm talking about their spam solution, not any of the other 200 things they've done that could be likewise described.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Saying that making people pay for e-mail because someones uses e-mail to send SPAM, is like saying that people should pay for pings because someones uses pings for DoS attacks.
The best solutions (but hard to implement due to the stupidity of a major portion of computer users, like those who open attachments and spread MyDoom) is to have verifiable sender and reciever. I.e. have e-mails digitally signed, so that you'll be sure that it's send from that specific someone specifically for you. That would actually also stop e-mails from viruses who fake the "From:" field.
Perhaps if digital signing and verifying will be made seamless in the mail (STMP and POP3/IMAP/HTTP servers) servers, it will actually work!
I'm sure this will reduce the trouble I have scanning slashdot for relevant info to the MINOR TROUBLE OF RECEIVING TONS OF "Please add me to your contact/whitelist" REQUESTS.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Y'know, paying real postage with real letters does not stop my real mailbox from getting filled with junk. How is this any different from spam, then?
This will work just until the day either of these companies discover that they can reduce the postage considerably for "bulk" mail and still make a profit... and at that point you have an automatic list of guaranteed good addresses since people won't be so paranoid about spam.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I'm getting about 800 spams or more each day at the moment across several e-mail accounts. I'd simply love to be able to read them all but there isn't time. Each one politely requests I visit a webpage. I'd love to help those spammers by doing as they ask and visiting those URLs.
/dev/null directory for my pleasure. Of course it can be tricky to find them afterwards so my program will probably need to revisit each site two or three times. It could even run as a screensaver when I'm away from my PC!
What I need is a program that will visit them for me and carefully store their content in my
Maybe the spammers that ask the loudest I would revisit the most times.
Now if a few million other people were so dilligently doing the same I reckon that would soon solve the spam problem.
http://karmic.sourceforge.net
Developers wanted.
while sco {
wget -O
}
The fact still remains, though, that I have _far_ better stuff to do with my time than mess with spam filters and whatnot. It's a real problem. The whole thing is costing the hundreds of millions of end-users both time and money.
So basically:
A) If a small postage fee / whitelist scheme is what it takes to get my time and usable e-mail back... I, for one, welcome our new Microsoft and Yahoo overlords.
Every proposal I've seen so far is basically based on the idea "either pay up _or_ get the end-user to whitelist you". Basically the postage fee is just an incentive to get people to cooperate in setting up the whitelists.
How's that a problem? I'd have my family, co-workers and friends whitelisted, so they don't have to pay a cent. And for the rest of the world, sorry, if what's in that e-mail isn't worth the proverbial 2 cents for you, then it's not worth my time to read it either.
The same goes for mailing lists. If your readers want to read the list, have them whitelist you. There you go.
B) If it does make people get off e-mail and start using some centralized IM service, that's good for me too. I'm still getting the same information, only over a different medium.
Only it's a medium that, unlike SMTP, never was supposed to be an anonymous unregulated network, where everyone can run his/her own open spam relay. When everything goes through a central server (farm), as is the case with IM, it's very easy to notice when someone is spamming.
It also opens a whole new can of possibilities of centrally regulating or filtering it all. E.g., changes like making a whitelist available, can be pushed onto those centralized IM servers without 5 years of debating if we really need to change SMTP.
E.g., you can make mailing lists a centralized service. Now you can tell if 30,000 people actually subscribed to Bob's "H3RB@L V1@gr@" mailing list, or Bob is just trying to spam 30,000 users. And you can probably stop the flood after the first 10 messages sent, if it doesn't go through the centralized mailing list service, instead of letting it pump millions of messages a day. You just made "opt in" mandatory and enforced.
Does that all sound like a disadvantage to me? Nope.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
As was said already, postage doesn't stop snail mail, but it sure limits it. How often do you get AOL CDs? I bet they're not sending you one per day. I'll also bet that you're not seeing 50 ads a day in your snail mail box. Well, that's the fundamental difference that postage does.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
sounds like a good idea to me
The tax is not a monetary tax. It's a MIPS tax. Anyone who wants to send legitimate email will have the opportunity to do, with virtually no impact on how they do it. The sender must run an algorithm - insted of buying a stamp. The only people affected (besides the obviuos spammers) will be those wo run large email redistribution lists. I'm sure that accomodatiosn will be made for em.
At the postmaster level, it should be even more evident that a group of similar messages to many users is spam. How hard is it to figure that a bunch of "Subj: hello" from "Ellen deGeneres" messages are bogus if they're going to many people at the same time? Even "Hello, [your name here]" shouldn't be too difficult to catch.
It might be argued that this would cast the net too wide and round up messages from our newbie friends (or moms) who use "hello" as the subject. However, a simple variation on this would be to create phony e-mail addresses and seed spam lists with them. That way an ISP would have a sample of what must be spam because it's addressed to no actual person. Using these messages as templates, it should be easy to round up the look-alikes.
Has something this simple already been tried and found wanting? I'd even upgrade some of my free e-mail accounts to paying ones if that bought me this service. This is something that would have to be done at a higher level than that of an individual user, hence is natural for an e-mail provider.
Seems like they could tax other things also.
FTP connections cost x cents per connection.
HTTP connections cost x cents per connection.
IM connections cost x cents per connection.
Anything they come up with will be the base code for other type of connection oriented billing.
Bad Idea.
When it comes, be looking for a Buddy-net to rise - ie, an internet of friends and organizations connecting with their own technologies and outside the realm of government and commercial use.
As soon as there is a charge per email in ANY form (ie. for either sending or recieving email even if only sometimes) , do you seriously think it will stay as a charge on only mail that you deem spam? Pretty soon there would be a charge for every mail you send - once the charging infrastructure is in place it would be a natural extension - at first justified as only being say, 0.1 cents per email.
I expect that pretty soon, that charge would increase like every other tax since the beginning of time has - 0.2 cents, 1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents. Next thing you know it costs almost as much to send an email as it does to send a snail mail, and we are all left standing around wondering how we let it happen.
Wake up people! allowing there to be any kind of charge per email, either sending or recieving is just opening up the gateway to charges on all email.
The only long term way to stop spam is:
instead of just chasing the spammers, hit the companies/individuals that have their products or services offered for sale via spam.
If they accept payment or orders for a service or product then it should be easy for the FBI etc. to trace who is paying the spammers to send the stuff, and make those guys responsible for (hopefully suitably heavy) legal penalties for getting people to send the stuff to your inbox - just like the guy that hires a hit man is also responsible for murder. If some other country is harboring the original organisation behind the spam, then slap the country with sanctions and/or diplomatic penalties, the same way you would do if the country was actively supporting other illegal activities, or just black hole it.
Filtering is useless - it stops spam at the wrong end - even if it is implemented at your ISP.
No! Allowing a charge of any sort simply opens the way for the powers that be (Microsoft, the government, your ISP etc) charge for all emails.
The only real solution is to prosecute the organisations behind the spam - not just the spammer, but the guy that pays the spammer's bills. Make it illegal for companies to advertise in this way, with *really* heavy penalties for spamming, that will do real financial damage to the organisations that are advertising.
Many companies I am sure would be only too happy to be hit with a small charge for the provelidge of spamming your inbox with their latest crap - many companies already pay to send out catalogues and real junk mail, so what makes you think a small charge would stop them?
Combine the computational challenge with a whitelist; the spammers will have to run the challenges most of the time, but your poor P166 shouldn't, usually.
It's a joke dumbass. Everybody knows the Times doesn't accept mere mortal sacrafice, only your eternal soul will do for them.
Charging ANY price would then make any spam sent to you legal as long as the price was paid. It may make the price of spam go up but it would increase the amount sent and then there would be NOTHING you could do to stop it. If you snail mail box is anything like mine 75% of your mail is the useless waste of trees. Go to the Post Office and try to stop it. you can't! Why? ITS PAID FOR!
As a mail server operator. Who get the penny??? Me the guy that has to put of with collecting it? I doubt it!
Open Relays aren't as big as a problem as it used to be. The hardest problem we have is infected home computer that have been turned into spam zombies. Spammer like dartmail.net well you just block them no problem, but with infected home computers what do you do? Reporting the fact the machine is infected to their ISP is useless. Blocking the IP range doesn't work because they don't use the same machine twice.
We block about 60% of our spam just my requireing authication, resolving DNS, and blacklisting.
All it would take to get rid of the last of them is PUT THE BASTARDS IN JAIL!
You've stated the problem along with your solution in the form of an example. How's that IPv6 deployment coming?
Most sysadmins are as resistant to change as the general population. Windows For Workgroups and BIND 4.x are still in use.
My suggestion is to use a pre-existing standard: PGP. Write good PGP software and push it as a solution to spam. "Tell all your friends to get PGP keys! Keep email safe from prying eyes! Avoid viruses by making sure you know the email really came from where it says!"
I think solving the problem in this way would be much easier. On one hand, you have to come up with standards, write software, and get people to switch. On the other hand, you have to write software and get people to use it.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Does it strike anyone as ironic and terrible that in our search for a solution to the commercial exploitation of email, we're considering...the commercialization of email?
Others want to replace SMTP altogether. Let me know when you've managed to force people to upgrade to IPv6 and stop using BIND 4.x.
What I would like to see is easy-to-use, cross-platform software for PGP, along with an effective campaign telling people why they want to use it. My ideas:
1. If you tell your friends and have them get keys too, you can be sure that email saying it's from them is from them.
2. If you convince all your friends, you can tell your mail client (via CoolNewSoftware) to classify signed messages as higher priority. Spammers won't sign messages. If they do, you can hold them to the CAN-SPAM act's promises, or filter their key.
3. Sending email today is like a postcard. With PGP, it's like a private courier with body armor. Got a secret message? Passwords? Phone numbers? Business secrets? Medical data? Don't risk it falling into the wrong hands.
I am a sysadmin/PostgreSQL+PHP weenie, and not qualified to write such software. But I would be willing to coordinate effort, help with "marketing", etc.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
The problem with email postage, or any like system, is that it would require a central agency to be aware of each and every message's sender and recipient.
How else would it be charged?
I would be tempted to move onto a competitive messaging protocol if this became true, because I value my privacy, though it's possible that the feds are already doing this at the ISP level. Encrypted message contents are great, but if people know who's talking to who, they can strongarm the key out of you in a pinch.
To make sure that this actually accomplishes what it's meant to accomplish, spammers could file a form 10498-B with Microsoft. This would waive the spammer's postage fees, and instead cause the recipient to be billed for the incoming spam at a rate equal to twice the one in the first paragraph of this post. And all payments would go directly into Bill Gates' personal bank account.
You ticked off many, many people. Your posts have been archived and I will ensure that every post you make is countered with a notice of what you did and what opinions you hold on censorship (despite your double-talk in your sig).
Your best bet right now is to abandon your account, get a new one, and never fuck with GNAA again.
I just want to ask
Why the general public aginst the solution of Market? Why they aginst the good solution so emotionly?
I suppose I could be wrong, but I really get the impression that it's gotten to be enough of an annoyance that a large enough segment of the public would prefer an authenticated, "postage-like", email system.
That's not to say that regular email will go away overnight (or that it will go away at all - there is something to be said for the "simple" in SMTP)
Both the WSJ and PC magazine have had articles implying that many end users (especially companies) are looking for good ways to move away from traditional email.
Don't get me wrong, I'm "old-school", and I read my email with Pine on a unix box. But nowadays, I don't have time to tinker like I used to. I want a useful communications system that is predictable, reliable, and secure. Traditional email meets perhaps one of those criteria.