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Yahoo Revives Pay-Per-Email, With Charitable Twist
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."
The idea is that a Centmail signature attached to a message would automatically reduce the message's spam likelihood; if enough people adopt Centmail, then receivers would be increasingly able to require a Centmail signature on mail, and killfile mail that lacks such a signature.
In theory, great. In practice, I predict it spiraling out of control as different parties try to "get in on the action" and see a chance to turn a profit instead of just giving the money to charity.
Palm trees and 8
Honestly, this is one of the stupidest things I have heard of. For one, if this is adopted it will lead to discrimination of services (as in, you are using Gmail and not our ISP's pay-mail, so your message automatically gets flagged). For another, I've found that Gmail and other webmail services are pretty good of not giving false positives, in the few years I've been using Gmail, I've gotten 3 spam messages total, none of which was a false positive and no spam e-mails in my inbox. But honestly, this is simply charging for what should be a free service to help solve a problem that doesn't exist if you use Gmail (can't say for any other mail provider because Gmail has been so good I really haven't used any other mail provider).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Exactly, they're trying to charge spammers for guaranteed delivery to your inbox. I prefer the Gmail model of spam management - build some incredibly good filters and eliminate 99% of all spam.
It's essentially a way to guarantee to recipients of my email that it is not spam.
Also, when customers with zombiefied computers get a six figure bill from their ISP, maybe they'll spend a few bucks to get their system cleaned up and secured, which benefits everyone.
Well, the best part for the spammers is when they don't pay the 10$ because the owners of the zombie PCs do... This objection was raised years ago already for other "payment" schemes like for instance the computation payment (you do a computation that takes a lot of CPU to sign the message. So you "paid" for your stamp).
It does not sound like a very well thought plan. Maybe the idea is that people will be more careful not to get pwned?
From the paper, section 3.2 http://centmail.net/centmail.pdf :
A related scenario is when a user attempts to reuse a single legitimately obtained stamp to validate a single message sent to thousands of people. This is in fact considered to be acceptable behavior from the perspective of CentMail, similar to the use of blind carbon copy (bcc) for emails.
That sounds like exactly what spammers do - send the same message to thousands of people. So, really, that's $10 for delivery of 1,000 unique messages to unlimited millions of recipients. Good deal!
You offer three points in rebuttal:
...after the fact? Or will you have an automated system that prevents the mails from being sent if they seem suspicious? Otherwise a spammer can simply do a hit and run and exhaust the user's account. Regardless of that, spammers are more likely to control a very large amount of zombie Windows boxes, sending out a small number of e-mails on each machine.
1) An increase in use of Centmail points could be flagged as suspicious
2) If a user gets hacked, he just ends up donating more money to charity
Which is wonderful and all, but doesn't really solve the problem.
3) Hackers are more likely to be interested in other aspects of the user's computer
Spammers have demonstrably took over swathes of Windows machines exclusively to send out spam. Even if they didn't, centmail offers the chance to send a mail that is practically verified as genuine, which is very rare, and worth hacking a computer for.
Problem is this: if you blindly trust Centmail, then it'll be worth it for spammers to pay to send email. Don't believe it? Check your physical mailbox.
But what if your centmail account gets hacked and the hacker uses it to send millions of spam messages. If you credit card is on their file you will be down a $10,000. Of course you can feel good about donating that much to charity!
Life is about being a Phoenix!
Spam exists for one reason and one reason only: someone, somewhere is willing to buy from spammers or otherwise to give them money.
I recently read a theory that challenged the (afaict, completely factless, unproven) idea that the advertisers make money off of spam. It's P. T. Barnum's "There's a sucker born every minute", as seen in get-rich-quick schemes, applied to spam.
You have two parties - advertiser, and spammer. Advertiser pays spammer $10k to send a million spams. Spammer sends those million spams. The advertiser sits around, counting his imaginary sales. But nobody shows up. A couple of days pass, he sells $1k of stuff, and is $9k in the hole due to his spamming efforts. Does he spam again? Quite possibly not.
But who learned from that? Only that individual advertiser. Even if each advertiser never makes money, as long as there is another sucker in line, there will be no end to spam.
There's nothing I've seen that indicates the individual advertisers make good money off of spam. The spammers, sure. But they're just taking money from one sucker after another.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor