Impoverish a Spammer Today

esj at harvee writes "Recently the Camram project released its latest version of a hybrid sender-pays anti-spam system. The project has proven that sender-pays works and has demonstrated how to make it work with existing e-mail systems. Camram has developed hybrid sender-pays techniques that scale down to the desktop and up to the enterprise. It's a completely decentralized system that can put spam-fighting power in the hands of individuals. It gives you control of not only the current generation of spam, but also any future commercial spam -- why replace Viagra ads from a scam artist with Viagra ads from Pfizer?"

Comments

This cannot work

[ajs]

People who are frustrated by spam can use this system and it will work exactly as well as sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "neener, neener!"

I'm not going to pay to send you email. You might not care about that because you don't know me, and assume you'll never want to hear from me. But what about the person you ran into at the bar last night and gave your email address to? Will THEY pay to send you mail? What have you lost by ignoring them?

What about the job offer from a company that decides that adding a micropayment to your already substantial requested hiring bonus is just insulting?

You see, it's not the general case that's scary, it's that 10,000th message that you drop on the floor that turns out to be REALLY important. This is who learning filters are ultimately the right solution. They will continue to improve, and spam is ultimately doomed in the face of such technology.

LOAF, a simple extension to email

[xgavin]

LOAF is a simple extension to email that lets you append your entire address book to outgoing mail message without compromising your privacy. Correspondents can use this information to prioritize their mail, and learn more about their social networks. The LOAF home page is at http://loaf.cantbedone.org.

I'm sorry

[themusicgod1]

but sender-pay systems do NOT work. Most people are not going to use a pay service, period. The beauty of email is that it enables you to communicate with everyone, and the problems of email are that it enables you to communicate with everyone. Now one could say that the problems concerned with email are that it is too easily abused by scam artists and spammers -- well guess what, in the real world, there is a hell of a lot of perverse scam artists and spammers and if you want to communicate with the rest of the world you are sooner or later realize that it's crawling with them.

People in rural india, or anywhere else impoverished are not going to be able to afford fees to transmit their email, nevermind people without paypal/credit card/etc (ie most people), and this type of exclusion is exactly what is not needed in the world -- keep the internet free. If you must, hunt down spammers, and CRUCIFY them, but don't ruin the media as a whole. That would be letting the spammers win. Marketing scams and corporate brainwashing are more successful when you don't have 5 billion other people to compare notes with.