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
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
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
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.
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
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!