Slashdot Mirror
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'."
I am sure it doesn't have that much to do with the money they'll make. This idea has been suggested many times, and all of the times suggested, there has always been a white list, that if you choose to accept the senders mail, you can choose whether to have them billed or not. But here I see the problem, spammers are using open relays and hiding under anonymous accounts already. How will they bill them?
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
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.
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 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
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
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
...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.
also, best answer to spam, don't click on the links in it, don't read it, just delete it, if it wasn't profitable they wouldn't send it out. Sadly dumb people buy shit from telemarketers and spammers.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
But until then, would you like to be bob?
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
Why am I not going to be shocked when in 3 years my Postfix box will be ignored by Exchange servers because it's open-source and thus and open relay. This is such a shameless grab, almost as bad as their campaign to paint Linux boxes as unsecure. Any linux users remember THAT back in '99? Talk to any MS admin about a Linux box and they swore it was virus infected.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Replace SMTP with a more secure protocol. Give a 12 month window for everyone to upgrade their clients. Then make port 25 filtering mandatory for all ISPs.
and WHO is going to mandate this? SMTP is an ad hoc standard - ie people use it because people use it. If everybody's using it then that's a lot of people using it.
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.
Here's something for you to consider. Who the heck died and made you the tax collector for the world? That's exactly what they'll be saying to Microsoft and Yahoo. This approach would be excedingly painful to negotiate, worse, most of the open relays aren't great big machines, but zombies and small servers with lax security.
A couple years back some sh!t hit the fan regarding Bill Jones run for office in California. Seems some Campaign email was routed through a elementary school computer in Korea. What are you going to do? Send them a bill and have Microsoft or Yahoo goons shut down the school when they don't pay it?
What's needed is cooperation, not this loopy strategy.
Blacklist/Whitelist or roll out a new standard and have major ISP's switch over and at some point block old SMTP Problem solved.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Free to who, exactly? First you have to pay the CA for the 'privlidge' of using their certificates, then the ISP recieving massive ammounts of e-mail has to get very serious systems to crunch the numbers needed to verify the certificates.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
he can be nabbed under wire fraud laws and be open to all sorts of tasty civil action.
In how many countries?
(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!
How do you propose to secure SMTP? Precisely what architectual and/or cryptographic scheme do you propose that would work?
If I want to setup my own mailserver (not outside the realm of possibility, I'm a sysadmin) what hoops am I going to have to jump through to satisfy the Ultra Secure Email Lobbyists for Efficent Sending of Spam (USELESS)? Who do I go to if I believe someone is illicitly sending spam through their (presumably paid-for) email license?
How do you propose forcing every single ISP that they need to filter port 25? Those within the US? Those outside?
(And why bother if nobody uses SMTP anymore anyway?)
And that's just the start. If someone's machine get hits by a virus which spams people (or allows others to spam through that machine) how do I know that it was some evil guy and not Joe User who got compromised? How many people are even going to go through the expense of legal proceedings for the million-odd users out there with MyDoom on their machine?
Don't get me wrong, I don't think spam is fun. And I don't have a magic solution; I haven't even really thought about the problem.
But it's also clear that you haven't thought about it, either.
So unless you have an actual idea, or can point to someone who does, you're not going to garner that much interest.
also, best answer to spam, don't click on the links in it, don't read it, just delete it, if it wasn't profitable they wouldn't send it out. Sadly dumb people buy shit from telemarketers and spammers.
Sadly it only takes one purchase in a few hundred thousand to make money. This solution requires perfection that will never be acheived in a society which think janet jacksons boob is news (or worse, that it's offensive) and watches the simple life.