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."

Comments

How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[eldavojohn]

Subtitle of CentMail:

Do Good. Fight Spam.

So it sounds like an 'opt-in' program for doing otherwise would be suicide by a mail provider. And since it's opt-in, I highly doubt the spammers will be doing the opting. So unless your penny is going to an anti-spam organization, how are you fighting Spam?

Also, I'm not too clear on how this would work. Wouldn't it require a certificate-like central authentication server? And wouldn't this increase in traffic just exacerbate the situation of too much traffic? Especially if all Spam starts to come with fake 'stamps.'

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[FlyingSquidStudios]

It seems to me that the only way to truly insure that the receiver gets 100% spam-free mail is to intercept and sort it before it's received with humans doing the sorting. Even the most robust spam filters get overcome fairly regularly. I know I don't want anyone reading my mail but me.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[mcgrew]

So it sounds like an 'opt-in' program for doing otherwise would be suicide by a mail provider

I read this with alarm; I have a yahoo (actuallt rocketmail) account and I use it for slashdot. If this becomes popular I can see yahoo charging for all their mail services.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I understand, this is not fighting spam directly. It's to encourage the adoption of a system that eventually will allow people to fight spam effectively-- that is, if everyone's already used to paying the cent for sending an email, they won't care when every email provider adopts this model. It only costs them a few bucks, after all. However, if you're sending millions of emails...

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[TaggartAleslayer]

I have never understood the concept. Forget for a moment that spammers don't follow the rules, and generally work pretty hard to circumvent anti-spam measures, how are we all going to implement and maintain good measures on the receiving end?

Ohh... someone like Yahoo will do that for us. Got it. Just pay my monthly dues or licensing fees and then a low $.01 per email and it's all good. Glad this is such a humanitarian effort aimed at cleaning up our interwebs and not a huge cock-up out for profit, because then it would just be unethical...

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[binarylarry]

Oh right, the only foolproof way is to rely on HUMANS.

You must manage an IT dept or something, I take it?

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Darkness404]

However there are -tons- of legitimate reasons to have more than one e-mail account. For example, a business might want to have one for each employee, so there is one, another would be a personal e-mail, and another one would be an "internet" e-mail for occasions where you might not want to reveal your real name (forum registration, etc). Plus there are many occasions where you forget either a username or password and when you try to register for a new account it helpfully tells you there is already an account for the e-mail address yet won't send you the username. Another reason is for convenience, I used Yahoo mail for a while but then I realized that I might as well get a Gmail account because I searched Google, had Google as my homepage and never used Yahoo except to check mail.

And also this will create problems with students/poor people who while they can afford the "stamps" might not have a credit card to buy them. And finally, this is unethical because the cost of a single message is -far- less than one cent, similar to how US carriers charge 10 cents or more per text message when it costs them nothing to send.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[whisper_jeff]

If this becomes popular I can see yahoo charging for all their mail services.

Don't worry. It won't become popular.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[D'Sphitz]

Let them profit if they want, it sounds like a good idea to me. If I send 10 emails a day, which is probably much more than your average computer user, that's $3.00 a month. I can handle that, but a spammer who sends millions of messages a month cannot pay $10k per million messages.

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.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[TaggartAleslayer]

Another marked troll? Seriously. Yahoo does have mod points today...

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[betterunixthanunix]

Look at what happened with SSL. There are dozens of different authorities, each with different requirements, and the net result is that an SSL certificate is not the highly reliable security token that it might have been if greed had never entered the equation. This system will succumb to the same problem: everyone will want to get a piece of the action, and in the end only amateur spammers will be thwarted.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[causality]

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.

Besides, this doesn't address the ultimate cause (or depending on viewpoint, the ultimate enabler) of spam. Spam exists for one reason and one reason only: someone, somewhere is willing to buy from spammers or otherwise to give them money. Any solution which doesn't address that has entirely failed to learn why Prohibition didn't stop people from drinking or why the War on Drugs hasn't made illicit substances go away. It doesn't matter how sophisticated or underhanded the spammers are, if no one gives them money anymore they WILL go out of business. This is probably a matter of education, though it's possible that credit card companies could be part of the solution since many of these transactions could not occur without their services.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Fozzyuw]

I thought a lot of spam came through zombie / infected computers. So, it's just going to be other people who pay for it anyways.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[causality]

I have never understood the concept. Forget for a moment that spammers don't follow the rules, and generally work pretty hard to circumvent anti-spam measures, how are we all going to implement and maintain good measures on the receiving end? Ohh... someone like Yahoo will do that for us. Got it. Just pay my monthly dues or licensing fees and then a low $.01 per email and it's all good. Glad this is such a humanitarian effort aimed at cleaning up our interwebs and not a huge cock-up out for profit, because then it would just be unethical...

Also, why should I have to pay a new fee of any sort merely because someone else wants to send spam? The whole problem with spam is that everyone but the spammer has to bear its costs. This only increases the costs that all the rest of us have to bear because of spam. For that reason the ethics of this solution are already questionable despite its presumably good intentions.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[digitig]

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.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[causality]

And finally, this is unethical because the cost of a single message is -far- less than one cent, similar to how US carriers charge 10 cents or more per text message when it costs them nothing to send.

That's my main problem with it. The "logic" seems to go like this: "well, we couldn't come up with a way to make spammers pay, so instead we'll try to make everyone else pay to prove they're not a spammer." I can't support that.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Garridan]

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.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Foobar of Borg]

Also, why should I have to pay a new fee of any sort merely because someone else wants to send spam? The whole problem with spam is that everyone but the spammer has to bear its costs. This only increases the costs that all the rest of us have to bear because of spam. For that reason the ethics of this solution are already questionable despite its presumably good intentions.

Well, you see, the best way to make it work is to make the "charity" a special fund. The biggest spammers are only a few hundred people at most. So, the way the fund works is that, when it accrues to the point that we can hire a hitman to take out one of the spammers, we pay out to a hitman and the spammer gets whacked. Pretty soon, the spam problem is solved.

Or, I guess alternately we could use the special fund to do something legal like bribe congressmen/MP's/dictators (depending on country needing the action) to pass the needed laws or simply have the spammers arrested and thrown in jail for life.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Culture20]

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.

Yahoo is betting on that. The steps they'll take:

1. Charge 1 cent per email opt-in sent to charitable org
2. Pretend 1 cent isn't enough while the real reason is that other email systems don't implement similar setup and because spammers don't opt-in. Charge 2 charitable cents per email
3. Charge 3 charitable cents per email. Make the system opt-out.
4. Make the system mandatory. Reduce price to 2 charitable cents per email. The people rejoice!
5. Now that everyone's been used to paying money per email, raise price to 3 cents, but only 2 cents of the charge are donated (processing donations takes money from Yahoo).
6. ...
7. Collusion between Cell phone companies and ISPs on the price of SMS/email: 25 cents per each. US Postal Service goes postal and wants in on the deal.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[ashtophoenix]

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!

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[HikingStick]

The compromised bots would not likely ever incur the "postage" charge, because they're not going to relay through the Yahoo! mail server. They are going to run on a shadow server, sending out as many messages as they can. The only way the pay-per-email message might snag spammers and bots is if this were done at the ISP level, and if it were done by monitoring the SMTP traffic flows. [I, for one, don't think that would be a good situation.]

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Tony Hoyle]

Or the third option, they alter their botnets to sniff out centmail registered users and send the spam through that.. 80 year old grannies suddenly get hit with $100,000 email bills and lots of bad publicity ensues.

You're forgetting that most spammers do *not* send email. They have botnets for that.. and the botnets are just naive Windows users. Much as I like the concept of taxing people for not securing their computers it's not exactly fair.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Dan541]

SSL is a flawed system that was built on pure greed.

Why should I have to pay someone just so Firefox will not chase my users away.

SSL is nothing more than extortion and it has stopped encryption from becoming standard.

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[Dan541]

mail come in physical form?

Re:How Exactly Does This Fight Spam?

[apoc.famine]

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.

$10 for guaranteed delivery to 1,000 users?

[ickleberry]

Now here's something both the spammers and the ISP's will love. I presume somewhere in their long-term plan is a means of getting rid of all those pesky renegades who run their own email server and don't opt into this scam

Re:$10 for guaranteed delivery to 1,000 users?

[exhilaration]

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.

Re:$10 for guaranteed delivery to 1,000 users?

[Darkness404]

An even scarier twist would be if legislation makes it -illegal- to discriminate against mail sent this way with a spam filter (probably thrown in with some form of net neutrality) making it a guaranteed delivery, illegal to block.

Re:$10 for guaranteed delivery to 1,000 users?

[glop]

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?

Re:$10 for guaranteed delivery to 1,000 users?

[Nossie]

"when they don't pay the 10$ because the owners of the zombie PCs do.."

Gives them one more to give a fuck about security does it not?

Re:$10 for guaranteed delivery to 1,000 users?

[prograde]

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!

Re:$10 for guaranteed delivery to 1,000 users?

[NotBornYesterday]

I'm worried about the chilling effect of email being tied to commerce. Internet commerce requires that your identity be tied to the transaction, whether it is to the ISP who provides your email account, PayPal for your ebay goodies (or supporting Slashdot), CC transactions on Amazon, etc. They know who you are. Now, in an instance where you need privacy, or better yet, actual anonymity, you are screwed because you can't use email to blow the whistle on an employer who acts unethically, violates OSHA regs, etc. And I wouldn't be surprised if the government likes the ability to track a specific email back to a specific person.

I don't mean to come off like a tin-foil hatter, and could probably write a more coherent rant if I had more time. There is no good that can come from this. Ever.

what about pwned accounts?

[Khashishi]

How will this discourage spam if the spammers are just using pwned accounts?

Gosh.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm glad that goodwill and fuzzy feelings are able to cut transaction costs; because they'll be the real killer at $0.01 a pop.

I assume, because of this problem, that they'll either be billing you when your tab reaches some worthwhile value, and trusting you in the meantime, or forcing you to buy in large blocks ahead of time(which would be super annoying, goodwill or no).

How stupid....

[Darkness404]

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).

Re:How stupid....

[macraig]

Someone probably misapplied the Troll mod for "Shill". The guy sounded a bit like a shill for GMail, don't you think? Either that or a genuine noob: "...Gmail has been so good I really haven't used any other mail provider". Jeez, he's NEVER used ANY ISP e-mail account? I find that rather hard to swallow, unless he's really fresh off the boat. So yeah, if I were modding his post I'd be inclined to mod it something other than favorably myself. He's just not that believable.

Re:How stupid....

[macraig]

I've used GMail since its inception. To this day I still despise its MANDATORY antispam system, which continues to vex me with false positives that I'm hard-pressed to find in the deluge of actual spam in the Spam "folder".

This is compounded by the well-known bug in GMail that causes the system to ignore periods in addresses when it is delivering mail... in other words, any mail addressed to blahblahblah@gmail.com winds up being delivered to blah.blah.blah@gmail.com instead (perhaps only if there's no actual unique blahblahblah account). Because of that bug, I get MORE THAN TWICE the amount of spam that I "should" be receiving, because GMail is delivering mail to my Inbox that wasn't actually addressed to me!

GMail is great, but it also sucks, and sucks hard, at EFFECTIVE spam control. I can do much better with PopFile and localized filtering, but GMail won't even let me do it since their filtering can't be bypassed or disabled (you can't "opt out").

That's precisely why I found the original comments not credible. He was either clueless or disingenuous.

Re:How stupid....

[Tsujiku]

That's not a bug, it's a feature (for real). To their system, blah.blah@gmail.com is the same account as blahblah@gmail.com, and it was designed that way intentionally.

Oh well

[JohnHegarty]

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante (x) charitable

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
( ) 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
( ) 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
(x) 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
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(x) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) 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
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Re:Oh well

[Shakrai]

Well I knew that was only a matter of time. Anybody know the actual origin of the template above? Always wondered about that.....

Re:Oh well

[dreeves]

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

Re:Oh well

[CannonballHead]

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

Re:Oh well

[Tubal-Cain]

Missed a few:
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers.
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft.
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually.
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem.

Re:Oh well

[ricotest]

You offer three points in rebuttal:

1) An increase in use of Centmail points could be flagged as suspicious

...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.

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.

Re:Oh well

[MillionthMonkey]

I initially wrote and posted it here in 2003. Note the lack of a bitchslap against challenge-response schemes that hadn't yet become popular:

( ) Spammers pass all your Turing Tests

or something like that.

Re:Cost TOO MUCH!

[ctaylor]

I'd rather it was $1 per email. That might cut down on all those forwarded chain emails my relatives keep sending me.

Re:Forged headers?

[betterunixthanunix]

I think you would have to be authorized to Centmail's SMTP servers. Pwned accounts are not such an issue either, if you buy blocks of 500 "stamps" ahead of time and are not automatically billed for it; spammers would only get a small number of stolen stamps at a time, and that would at least slow them down.

The real issue is that it will not remain charitable for long. If it becomes popular, rival for-profit services will start cropping up, and we will wind up with a situation similar to SSL, where there are dozens of different authorities competing with each other, some with different levels of trustworthiness, some charging different amounts, etc.

Re:Cost TOO MUCH!

[betterunixthanunix]

In all honesty, I would rather keep email the way it is. This "stamp" based approach will not work; either nobody will adopt it, or it will become popular and a bunch of other stamping businesses will crop up looking to make some money. I would rather just continue with my current spam filters, which kill 95% of the spam that hits my machine -- the other 5% does not amount to anything terrible.

around we go

[mugnyte]

  Either the authentication traffic kills us, or the spammers clone any sort of component embedded in email to lend credibility. If you can fake an email as spam, you can fake a stamp.

  If Centmail stamps are auto-verified, then either an API must authenticate the key and authorize the action - which is a lot of traffic - at a single server/authority, or we disperse it. With dispersal, possibly for abuse goes up, and then we have new keys arriving which means more traffic. We of course can't use keys per mail, but perhaps per-sender. This is still a huge number of keys to be managed.

  Filters work as a form of decentralized authentication, where the proper "key" is passing the filter, which is slowly morphing from user feedback. This seems to me to degrade over time, as the filters cannot change quick enough, still weighing-in prior exclusions while accepting new ones. There's a fair amount of noise to ignore while people mark email they don't like as SPAM and similarities are extracted.

  Blacklists and Whitelists are just filters with a central authority, but open to more abuse and too coarse-grained to remove much, as spammers hop or spoof origins quickly.

  Overall, I don't feel like bolt-on public systems can categorize the messages other than how we're doing it today. If we had a re-do on email, it might involve some encryption for senders, certificate stamps, and a trust level of pathways and a distributed authorization system with feedback to violators. But we're a long ways off from that.

This has all been discussed for years.

Okay, I'll play this game.

[Ollabelle]

I'll set myself up as a charity, and have the system pull money out of my account, and put into the my other - er, the charity's - account. Now all my spam is blessed.

Re:Okay, I'll play this game.

[gd2shoe]

Cute, but wouldn't work.

Any unclaimed amounts would be confiscated as unclaimed property. The "owners" would then need to try to claim it from the government. (yes, they really do this.) As this would be a net income, they would love you. (not sure if it's the IRS or the State, but someone would pocket it for you.)

Please forward this

[xgr3gx]

This message is to raise money for a litte girl with cancer.
Every time someone forwards this email it's tracked, and AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Disney will donate $0.01.
The more people you forward to, the more money we can raise! So please...look into your heart and just take a few seconds to forward this message to everyone in your address book.
If you choose to be a meany, and not forward this email, you will die in 5 years, and so will everyone in your family.

Re:(almost) spam-free

[box4831]

Spellcheck. 80% of spam has beautifully awful spelling.

Which leaves about 95% of legitimate email with beautifully awful spelling

Instead of a charity...

[Hungus]

Instead of sending the 1c to a charity, why not send it to the receiver? I receive some x number of mail's per day and send y , but the number is small and the x-y is even smaller. However for the spammer x is probably similar, where y is 8+ orders of magnitude higher resulting in a financial disincentive to spam. Commercial email is incentivized to reduce its mailing lists and target more accurately, yet is not significantly punished for its high output to input ratio.

Assure vs Insure vs Ensure...

[Anonymous Coward]

As an insurance agent, I assure you (I promise you) that there is no way in hell we would insure you (provide indemnification coverage against a specified loss) against getting spam. The only way to ensure (make sure) you don't get spam is to turn your computer off.

If your dictionary tells you that "assure", "ensure" and "insure" are synonymous and, moreover, interchangeable, please send it directly to the nearest paper recycling mill and buy yourself a set that doesn't retard your language skills.
Cue the "languages evolve" crowd. Languages may evolve, but evolution through ignorance and stupidity is hardly evolution at all; the words exist with their entirely different meanings for a reason: to convey an idea to another party. If that idea ends up being open to interpretation due to the use of ambiguous words, odds are you have failed to convey your idea entirely.