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Yahoo Revives Pay-Per-Email, With Charitable Twist

Posted by timothy on from the penny-post-sans-post dept.

holy_calamity writes "Yahoo research have started a private beta of a scheme that resurrects the idea of charging people to send email to cut spam. Centmail users pay $0.01 for each message they send, with the money going to a charity of their choice. The hope is that the feel good effect of donating to charity will reduce the perceived cost of paying for mail and encourage mass adoption, making it possible for mail filters to build in recognition of Centmail stamps."

4 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oh well by dreeves · · Score: 3, Informative

    We did try to address these common objections. See Section 3.2 of the paper: http://centmail.net/centmail.pdf

  2. Re:Oh well by CannonballHead · · Score: 3, Informative

    The closest I can find to an "original" is this one, which is linked to a lot.

  3. Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 3, Informative

    Except that part of establishing secure communications is authenticating the other end, or else you are vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack; that is why SSL has a certificate system. If the only intention was to have a means of encrypting communication, then there would be no reason for SSL to have such a complicated protocol that includes identification and capabilities management.

    --
    Palm trees and 8
  4. Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam? by digitig · · Score: 3, Informative

    The spam-fighting method is to build a sufficient number of email accounts that work that way and start black-listing every email that does NOT work that way and/or is not on your contact list. Not that hard to do.

    Yeah, maybe you can afford to send new customers to /dev/null, but I sure can't.

    --
    Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?