Penny Black Project Investigates Sender-Pays E-mail 364
Anonymous Coward writes "The Inquirer reports: Microsoft contemplating charging for emails. 'MICROSOFT IS UNFOLDING something it calls the Penny Black project in which people sending emails might have to pay for the privilege.' Microsoft's explanation of the project is here: The Penny Black Project." There are a lot of things going on at Microsoft Research -- no guarantee that particular ones are going to be released in the real world. (And Microsoft isn't the only party interested in sender-pays, or at least sender-risks-paying systems.)
Wow this article isn't what I expected. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an anti-spam tool that doesn't need to be paid in cash. This also presents /. with an interesting juggling act: we hate Microsoft, but we also hate spam.
Re:Wow this article isn't what I expected. (Score:2)
Why do I suspect that by the time Microsoft management gets through with it, it will be payable in cash only, and to you know who.
Want to send email to anyone to or from MSN, Hotmail, or any other MS-owned domain? Sure thing -- is your license of Microsoft Postage paid up?
Re:Wow this article isn't what I expected. (Score:3, Insightful)
The unfortunatly thing would be that I can see the US postal service jumping on board with this. Issuing every US citizen a unique email address and then charging for it's use. Which I also have absolutly no desire to have, or pay for.
Re:Wow this article isn't what I expected. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Penny Black project is investigating several techniques to reduce spam by making the sender pay. We're considering several currencies for payment: CPU cycles, memory cycles, Turing tests (proof that a human was involved), and plain old cash.
This just looks like a group (of smart people) that are investigating ways to reduce spam.
--sex [slashdot.org]
Re:Wow this article isn't what I expected. (Score:2)
Money transfer on the net (Score:2)
it would never work (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance, I run a popular auction site and on your average day my system sends out about 1,500 auction-won notices, 1,500 auction closed notices, 2,000 auction closed without a winner notices, 200 account related notices (new accout, lost password, etc) and about 500 misc emails for other various reasons.
This comes out to almost 6,000 messages per day from my system (which is 100% free by the way). This doesn't even count personal correspondance.
Now there are a few questions. First, I run my own mail server for the auction site. Do I pay myself $60/day to send email? Or do I pay my ISP even though it isn't their server? Or do I pay microsoft for the right to send email from myself through my own server to my own users who are expecting to get these messages?
Re:Wow this article isn't what I expected. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wow this article isn't what I expected. (Score:3, Funny)
I once got 36 million in 4 days. The spammer thought I had an open relay... I didn't. I hope the intended recipients do not miss their spam.
Remember the good old days... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is rapidly being forgotten that things being free was one of the reasons why this internet thingy took off in the first place.
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:5, Insightful)
Much like freedom though, there are always the jackass minority that abuse it and wreck it for the rest of us.
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, the Tyranny of the First Defector: Whoever first decides to abuse a system reaps maximum reward, which (a) encourages more defectors and (b) reduces the willingness of collaborators to remain in the game. It happens because defection lowers the average benefit, but the defector doesn't care about average benefit. He cares only about his specific benefit, which can easily exceed the average.
The end result, though, is that the average benefit declines and the specific benefit decreases even faster until we're all stuck mucking around at a single, much lower benefit. Phoo!
RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
Re:RTFA (Score:3, Interesting)
As the title says, RTFA. The article isn't as clear as it should be, but many of the options do not involve any money whatsoever.
An option which the article doesn't specificly mention is the possibility of allowing the recipient of the E-mail to be the one who gets the money. I don't know if they are considering that option, but it would be an effective option. 10 cents or more per stamp is not a problem if most people simply decline redeem the stamp you used. If you send (non-spam) e-mail to your friends they aren't going to cancel the stamp (collecting the 10 cents). If they don't cancel the stamp it doesn't cost you a cent because you still have your 10 cents on deposit. You could keep re-using a single 10 cent stamp to send an E-mail every two days or so. With a $1 deposit you can send up to 10 E-mails every two days. If someone sends you spam or other undesireable mail you have the choice to collect 10 cents per E-mail.
Spammers will always use open mail relays that are off shore to send spam.
No, the point of the system is that you may use an E-mail client that would simply ignore or reject any unstamped mail.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but they are one of the few entities capable of leading a change-over in the E-mail system to solve the spam problem. If Microsoft attempts to get greedy or abusive I will be in the front row bitching at them. We have to wait for them to actually decide on a system first. It could be a good system or a bad system.
-
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:2)
See sig for details.
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:2)
This is a GOOD thing (Score:2)
Join the IM2000 mailing list.
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
One of the brightest things I have heard.... (Score:2)
The problem I have with paying to send an email is that it is yet another cost to add to your monthly bill.
People like to pay for things in all or nothing mode. Why do you think people get cell phones that say you can call for X minutes for free. Pay cable and you get X channels, etc.
When you are nickeled and dimed to death people become conservative when they should not. Witness in Europe the changing Internet usage when people switch to DSL or Cable.
But back to the point, REALLY nice idea....
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:3, Insightful)
*laughs* One of the REASONS it's as popular as it is is because people decided to use it to make money. The web is not entirely built by good intentions.
Let's see. There's the ISP's and broadband providers... There's the online merchants who pay for banner advertising to support sites like Slashdot... There's the commercial companies who pay US to put them on the net and keep them on the net.
Granted, there's also blights-of-the-net like AOL, whom we'd all be better off without. But--if it weren't for the commercialization of the net, and the net's evolution into a commodity, then a lot of us wouldn't be here right now.
-Sara
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:2)
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:2, Informative)
Can't say the same about MSN/AOL.
Yes, I do remember the good old days. When sites loaded fast, when Netscape 2.x dominated, and there wasn't this huge commercialization of the Internet. Nothing against commercialization, but when people start wanting to charge for a basic service of the net (Email), its gone too far.
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:2)
Charging for email doesn't make any sense to me. I'm already paying for access to the network and the bandwidth used by them. I only send mail to people I know. Sure, a pay for email system could reduce the amount of spam, but it could have an even more chilling effect on normal email. This would make email an uneffective communication method as the only ones willing to pay to use it would be those that could afford the additional fee or companies that felt they could still make money off of commercial email. Of course the article talks about money not being the only way to make the sender pay, but I think that will be the only route actually taken.
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:2)
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:2)
Factoring a number provided by the _client_ is a better way, that way the clients can decide how high a 'price' they will set, with some demanding at least 10 seconds of CPU time (at current speeds) to deter all spam, while others don't require any 'payment' and choose to accept all messages.
Alternatively, instead of factoring a number provided by the client, you can take a hash of the message body and recipient's address, and do something computationally intensive with that. This proves you have burnt a reasonable number of CPU cycles to send the message, and the result can be checked by the client at the other end. Because the recipient's address is included in the hash you have to recompute for each message you send out.
Re:Remember the good old days... (Score:3, Informative)
Rich.
SPAM prevention techniques (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SPAM prevention techniques (Score:3, Interesting)
Having said that, I for one would be happy to pay to send emails, in just the same way that I pay to make a phone call, if it did result in a reduction of spam to about the level of telemarketing calls (of which I get significantly less than the 500 spams a day that a previous poster mentioned!)
MS won't be in control of this (Score:2)
Not such a bad idea, but who's running it? (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, I don't want to pay for email, I already get it for free. I think that this idea would be great if it could somehow charge spammers for emailing me, while letting me send out whatever i want.
Email is already free, I don't see a way for any company to charge for it, but I am all for using any tool to stop spam as long as it doesn't hurt me.
Re:Not such a bad idea, but who's running it? (Score:2)
Re:Not such a bad idea, but who's running it? (Score:2)
I think either of these would work, but only if *every* *single* *ISP* *in* *the* *world* did this. If even ten percent didn't, we'd see a mass migration of spammers to thos sites. Then again, if that happened, it'd be very simple to block those sites
Re:Not such a bad idea, but who's running it? (Score:2)
Why 10?
I was sorting out my work inbox this afternoon and noticed the number of emails received today:
20 personal emails from coworkers and friends (yes, we are allowed)
Around 10 from customers I have performed tech support duties with
20 from other departments connected with my work
And at least 20-30 informational emails from our administation department which are essential to perform my job.
Yes it is an Exchange server, but that doesn't account for the external emails I send/receive from customers and other coworkers in the field, who use external mail servers.
Maybe you are referring to personal mail accounts, however, 10 is very limited - imho of course.
Tim
People tend to forget.... (Score:2)
Lets think about this:
1) Ever looked at your snail mailbox? No SPAM there, oh wait yes there is....
2) Ever sat down at the dinner table and had somebody phone you? No SPAM there, oh wait there is too....
3) Ever turn on TV in Europe late at night and had to watch during the commercials how you have the chance to talk to a "really mature and hot woman". No SPAM there, oh wait there is too...
The point is that because the Internet is free does not mean there is more or less SPAM. Even SPAMMER have costs, like finding a server, bandwidth, etc. I would even say that the ISP's contribute to the problem because often they turn a blind eye to SPAMMERS themselves. SPAMMERS chew up valuable bandwidth, which in turn makes money for the ISP.
Charging for SPAM will do nothing to lessen the SPAM. It will only increase the price of those that want to SPAM. Face it folks advertising, or OOPS SPAM is here to stay and it is getty nasty!
Re:People tend to forget.... (Score:2)
1) Ever looked at your snail mailbox? No SPAM
there, oh wait yes there is....
Paid for by the sender. In addition, the DMA has an opt-out list that they honor.
2) Ever sat down at the dinner table and had somebody phone you? No SPAM there, oh wait there is too....
Again, paid for by the caller. Again, an opt-out list (state-by-state in the US, anyways). The magic words are: "Put me on your do-not-call list... NOW!"
3) Ever turn on TV in Europe late at night and had to watch during the commercials how you have the chance to talk to a "really mature and hot woman". No SPAM there, oh wait there is too...
And how do you think that the "free" TV is paid for? In addition, on TV, you have multiple channels.
In all your examples, the financial onus is on the advertiser. With current email models, there is no financial onus on the sender, so it's economically feasible for them to send zillions of emails for an INCREDIBLY small return.
Re:Not such a bad idea, but who's running it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's say it's FREE to send email to people who's "white list" you're on. This would include (if you're like me) 95% of the emails you send each day.
When you're sending an email to someone who doensn't know you (e.g., you're not in his addressbook "whitelist"), it costs you a penny.
For me, it would probably cost me between a dime and a quarter each month. I'd say that's well worth it to stop spam *and* to increase the chance that an email I send cold is read.
Sadly, most--if not all--unsolicited email I receive goes straight into the recycle bin. Who knows what I'm missing?! --
Re:Not such a bad idea, but who's running it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Easiest way to deter spam (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Easiest way to deter spam (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Easiest way to deter spam (Score:2)
Re:Easiest way to deter spam (Score:2)
Alternatively, the identities could be linked to individuals, meaning that you will not want to risk sending spam with your identity. However, this removes a LOT of anonimity of email and I'm sure people, even 'non-spamming' people, will balk at this.
I really do believe that the only solution is to change a small amount (a penny, or something settable by the recipient, for example) to send mail, with the option of the receiver refunding the penny once received.
There NEEDS to be some kind of financial hit for the sender to send spam. It's the only incentive that entities with no concience (Ie, spammers, or corporations) will listen to.
nah (Score:3, Insightful)
The Penny Black project is investigating several techniques to reduce spam by making the sender pay.
Well sorry, but I get a pile of junk mail every week on my doormat through my post and in my papers - and the senders have had to pay both to print AND send that...
Re:nah (Score:5, Informative)
Well, yes, but from what I understand this pile of junk mail supports the post office. Now spam supports no one and steals resources from everybody's networks.
Also, junk mailers tend to be pretty good about removing you from their lists precisely because it costs money to send junk mail. When it costs money, they will not send it to someone who resents them enough to call with removal request. Again, spam has no such insentive... your email becomes more valuable with "active" mark, that's all.
Re:nah (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, junk mail is sent at bulk mailing rates so low that in fact it costs the post office money, which they then pass on in the form of 1st class mail stamps. All postal rate increases have to be set by congress, and the direct mailing industry has a powerful lobby, so it is very difficult to get those bulk rates increased.
Re:nah (Score:5, Informative)
Spoken like someone who has zero experience with bulk mailing.
"Bulk mail" is cheaper for the simple reason that it is a labor-sharing program between the USPS and the mailier. The mailer pre-sorts their mail (hence the official name "presorted mail") by region before handing it off to the post office. The finer the level of sortation, the less the mailer pays in postage. A mailer that goes so far as to sort down to the carrier route (putting the pieces in the tray in the order the delivery person goes down the streets) pays considerably less than mailers that sort just by three-digit zone. This is sorting that the USPS itself doesn't have to pay for, hence the smaller postage.
And on top of that, the mailer can elect to drop the mail into the mailstream closer to the delivery point. Mailers pay less if they're willing to drop the mail off in the destination zone themselves, and they even have the option of dropping the presorted mail off at the destination post office.
The price of first class mail versus standard mail doesn't subsidize standard mail, it pays for services that don't come with standard mail. Services like "forward to the recipient's new address," "return to sender" and the like. This is why putting "return to sender" on those CDs AOL sends through standard mail doesn't do a damn thing; they didn't pay for the return-to-sender option.
"All postal rate increases have to be set by congress,"
No, they're set by a board of governors appointed by the White House and approved of by Congress. Congress can only say "yes" or "no" to rate change proposals. Anybody that wants to make alterations to rates have to go through the board of governors.
"and the direct mailing industry has a powerful lobby,"
Yes, direct mailers have representation in the board of what the USPS refers to as "stakeholders," but they are far from the only stakeholders (ie. customers) represented there. For example, all bills must be mailed at first class rates, which means utility companies are interested in keeping first class postage down.
But this is all besides the point. There is no cross-subsidization between rates as you are suggesting. That is flat-out illegal and frequent GAO investigations have shown that this is not happening (and I dare you to find a link with unrefutable evidence to the contrary) (No, intentionally misleading "libertarian" opinion pieces don't count). And even if they were compelled to keep standard mail rates lower, the USPS still has the problem of paying for itself, as postal operations aren't subsidized by taxes.
All in all, the USPS runs a heck of a lot more reputible operation than, say, any Baby Bell or CATV operation. They don't have anywhere near the public oversight the USPS has, which gives them more freedom to abuse their monopoly powers. And in the end, these corporations care about their investors far more than their customers.
And if you want to talk about powerful lobbying groups, take a look at all the money UPS is throwing at Congress to have the whole thing shut down. The same UPS that has raised their rates higher and more often than the USPS. Hey, it keeps the shareholders happy...
Re:nah (Score:2)
Not only that, they get a special "bulk" rate, thats about half of what we pay to send snail mail. So odd's are the same model might apply to email - our email's would cost a penny each, the spammer's about a half cent each.
And the USPS is your friend in that too (Score:3)
Everyone knocks the post office, but for $0.37, would you deliver a letter anywhere in the US?
Fraudulent Business's are not the issue (Score:2)
Therefore using these models as a reference making people pay for email does nothing to reduce the SPAM.
Oh wait, it does one thing. It makes it possible for one company to control content. One company decides what is good for me! Namely the POST or possibly Microsoft?
EG, maybe I really do want my penis enlarged! Because those emails are not sent out, with everybody ignoring it. Maybe, just maybe there are some people who really want their penis enlarged!
Good news! (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Are all of the anti-government types happy now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Give me one reason to believe that Microsoft is stupid/bold enough to get away with chargine Joe Sixpack for his e-mail (given the amount of control Microsoft has over the e-mail market right now).
Also, saying this is a slippery slope and, while it may begin with good intentions, could eventually lead to widespread abuse is the very core of most "anti-government" arguments. While you didn't spell this out explicitly in your post, you'll have to fall back on that argument at some point, given that the article states good intentions, and you're accusing them of having bad ones.
Is Microsoft a bad company? Yes. Was your post nothing more than self-important posturing? Yes. Did you read the article? Probably not.
Charging for emails? Yeah, right. (Score:2)
Sounds like an interesting pipedream by someone from Microsoft's research department, I'm not going to pay them, yes, I use OE, (great, I'm going to get dozens of virii now...), but I'll switch over to pegasus mail or some other free mail application. Hell, I'll try to rig pine to work just for the hell of it...
OT: virii? no (Score:2)
Just fix SMTP! (Score:4, Insightful)
An SMTP replacement that verified - at least - that the domain of the sender was correct - would cut down on spam tremendously. Virually all spam I get has forged headers and invalid reply addresses.
SMTP is too ingrained (Score:3, Insightful)
Changing SMTP means switching over every SMTP server and relay.. that's a lot of work and there's a lot of financial resistance to that.
On the other hand this micropayment system can be implemented on TOP Of SMTP... using a server that issues digitally signed tickets, which can simply be appended as an attachment to the emails.
Certainly this system will meet some resistance as well, but much much less. It will only require the clients to change what they are using, not the servers. However in the long term we could probably consider a replacement for SMTP... for example we could roll out the client code together with the client code for this Penny Black system. Then, if this system gets wide spread then people can deploy replacement-for-SMTP servers confident that clients will be able to use them
Re:SMTP is too ingrained (Score:2)
Authentication isn't that hard user name and password backed by radius like nearly all the dial in and PPoE connections are handled now this makes trust relationships easy to set up etc and it's not something new for the ISP's
Removal of random relays not allowing outgoing syn's to destination port 25 is pretty easy and smart hosts are easy as well. This lets you still get all the incomming eamil you want with you own server etc but says no you must authenticate to leave the ISP if something gets sent along with this as in an appended header again it's easy enough to trace. Yea this does make it suck when the ISP's mail server goes down but hey if your that worried then you have a backup ISP right use that one (this is starting to sound like UUCP)
Throw is some crypto say a PGP signing with the public keys stored in a DNS record to make it easy. This means the headers can be signed and we can reject anything that failed that test.
Hrm what do we end up with a decent solution for a few years from now the sooner it gets started the sooner we get less spam.
Easy (Score:2)
Re:SMTP is too ingrained - a solution! (Score:2)
- All penny black servers must also support SMTP authentication.
- Unauthenticated email clients must provide a penny black payment.
- Authenticated clients need not do so.
This scheme allows SMTP authentication to be gradually deployed. Any enterprise with an SMTP server will be motivated to implement SMTP AUTH + Penny black to stop spam. Initially, clients without authentication will use the penny black system. If that is a bother, then they can upgrade to proper SMTP authentication.Legitimate mass email simply needs to support SMTP authentication.
IM2000 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just fix SMTP! (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's say a SMTP replacement is in place and you now know for certain that the spam you just received did in fact originate from throwawayaccount@isp.net . Now what good is that information, since by the time you act on it, the spammer is done with the account?
SMTP is clearly not the problem.
maru
Might be a good system (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the solution to spam should be an open, non-proprietary solution, which means it will likely be open-source or IEEE/W3C approved.
No need to charge for email (Score:2, Interesting)
I would argue that the real solution to SPAM is to fix SMTP such that it authenticates users and servers at the protocol level while mail is passed from the originating server to the final destination. But of course, there's no need to charge a per-email fee in such a circumstance. And while I'm not surprised to see Microsoft devoting R&D dollars toward such a scheme, given todays 'charge for it and make it fit into an economic model or it doesn't exist' guilded age we should expect MS is only one of many to try and find a way to extract more money for the things we take for granted as free today. Would anyone like to buy some of my bottled air?
--Maynard
Re:No need to charge for email (Score:2)
What a dilemma! (Score:2)
Imagine what a dilemma this story would have been for the /. editors! While on the one hand wanting to trumpet "Yay! The end of spam!!", the other half wanted to write "No!! M$ is up to its dirty tricks again to demolish your last bit of freedom!!!". Note the uncertain, uncomfortable tone of timothy's comment: "There are a lot of things going on at Microsoft Research -- no guarantee that particular ones are going to be released in the real world." ;^)
Re:What a dilemma! (Score:5, Informative)
It sounds like a decent idea to me, but with certain thorns. The biggest one is What about legitimate, truly-opt-in mailing lists? Email is a genuinely low-cost communication method for non-profit groups (not just official tax-exempt non-profit groups,I mean all kinds of clubs, associations, groups of friends, etc.), and a per-email fee intended to hinder junkmail could also pinch a lot of people I wish it wouldn't. Maybe in the end that would be a fair tradeoff, but as spam filters get better (and ISPs get more aggressive about blocking spam on their side), I'm skeptical of that.
Also, some people send a lot of short emails; does charging per-email make sense vs. (for instance) per-byte?
And as for my opinions of Microsoft, well, you're free to read my earlier comments about Microsoft if you want to learn that;)
Tim
Re:What a dilemma! (Score:2, Informative)
It seemed to me that they were being careful not to pinch those people, by proposing tokens which get cancelled by the recipient if the email is genuine. They also talked about whitelists in the article, which I suppose is a method of automating the token cancelling.
rules (Score:2)
Bandwith charges? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not make networks pay for the e-mail that originates there? Subtract the e-mail that arrives. For most companies/networks - that will be just about an break even proposition. For the ones who allow spammers - well... that is going to get expensive pretty quickly. Sooo... they will either boot the spammers off, or get them to pay it. Either way, we win!
If Microsoft really cared about spam... (Score:2)
They would start by giving Hotmail users real spam filtering, instead of a limit of 250 blocked addresses. It's incredibly easy for spammers to cycle through that many addresses-- especially if you have more than one spammer throwing that sh*t at you.
One day this week, I had 20 new emails when I logged into Hotmail, and they were all spam. This is a little more than usual, but this is a dormant account, folks! I am considering abandoning my Hotmail account because of this sorry situation. Other email accounts I have use more effective spam fighting measures, and I have the ability to filter it in Evolution, thank goodness. I have a hard time believing that the 'penny black' scheme would be much of a solution-- I think we're talking about legislating fines, a la telemarketers. We already pay our ISPs for the privilege of email and other services, and I presume spammers are paying for the bandwidth they're using, too. If MS wants to impose this upon its own Internet customers, more power to them if they're really spammers, but I don't think they should be in charge of this issue for the Internet.
Re:If Microsoft really cared about spam... (Score:2)
Hotmail is a very good service, not to rely on, but to have so you can sign up for websites and not spam your email address, and so you can sign up for interesting mailing lists where you can't trust their "no spam" or "opt out" promises.
Re:If Microsoft really cared about spam... (Score:2)
What about good spam? (Score:3, Insightful)
How about allow people 100 sent mails per day (Score:3, Insightful)
IE you could send 1000 internal e-mails over your own network and pay nothing.
You send 1000 e-mails to people "outside" of your inernal network in a day you pay 900 cents, or for those of you with math mad skillz thats 9 bucks.
So a spammer trying not to pay a lot of money would have to send only 100 e-mails a day for free.
if he sent 5000000 e-mails in a day thats 5000000-100, 4999900 pennys, or for those of you in the math "know" its 49,999 dollars.
Now im sure that if a spammer were to have to pay 49999 dollars to send E-MAIL, their business would become less than profitable.
Most users dont send 100 e-mails a day, even when i was getting 70 e-mails a day i didnt reply to all 70.
auto responce mails could be ignored.
large companies might get a "bulk" rate on e-mail, or move there services to online methods of checking (IE they dont have to flood mail servers with 'gamespy announces it got cooler') kind of e-mails.
anyway the idea has some merits, though even now I can tink of a great many problems with it.
anyway just a little teaser idea.
Problem (Score:2)
Who charges me? Mail is just TCP/IP traffic.
Re:Problem (Score:2)
Re:How about allow people 100 sent mails per day (Score:2)
Mozilla's bugzilla gets about 200 bugs filed a day (most of them also get marked duplicate the same day). Each bug generates a minumum of 3 mails -- reporter, assignee, QA contact. That's 1200 mails a day right there (600 to open them, 600 to resolve duplicate).
This is not even including the real work that happens with the bug database... I'd estimate that on a typical day about 10000-20000 email messages are generated by bugzilla.
If you think... (Score:2, Interesting)
And by the way, my incoming spam cost me only aggravation, and I'd rather tweak my mail.app settings than to pay someone by the message. By 'recipient' they must be referring to people running their servers and having to filter this stuff. Boo-fricking-hoo. Solve your mail server problems and do it in the ost resilient monetary fashion.
Maybe they're lining up behind the gummint under the apparently delectable idea that we can trample everyone's rights and assumptions to make life a little easier for people who aren't doing their job in the first place.
This is the electronic equivalent of plastic sheets and duct tape.
"We're from Miscrosoft. We're here to help."
Yes, I know it's only research, and it may never see the light of day, but then explain the rest of the half baked MS implementations that have been sanctified, dogma-fied, shoved down our throats and caused us to question our sanity - directx,
I gotta go.
What's worse is monopoly collusion with USPS (Score:2, Interesting)
According to a Nov. 21, 2002 Seattle Times article:
So now it becomes clear why the Bush administration has gone easy on Microsoft -- it planned to become its business partner.Hmmm (Score:2)
Hmm. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an interesting idea.. I just don't see how its any better than forced verification of the originating addresses on an incoming email, though.
I mean, I can see how this could get expensive for the type of people who forward around those annoying chain emails, or jokes or what have you. Undoubtedly, they'd cut it out after realizing that people aren't reimbursing them for their email. But for the spammers at large..
See, the thing is, you're putting the responsibility for this back on the users. If I get an email, I'm either going to have to manually reimburse them, or manually not reimburse them. The onus is still on the end user.
Sure, they might be investigating Turing-test checks for spam, and the like, and yes, there is Bayesian filtering now too. But this is all still going to have to be there to automate the process, even with this transaction system.
I would've hoped that, by now, we'd be looking at ways to move this onto the system, in the form of proper verification or something, so we the users don't have to deal with it as much. (To those of you talking about having to upgrade all of our infastructure to handle verification, should the protocol change, what makes you think we wouldn't have to if a transaction pay-per-email system comes into place?)
The other problem I see is that these spammers might just not care about the cost. I mean, c'mon, a penny an email? That's still cheaper than a snail-mail ad.
Bill Gates - The Road Ahead (Score:2, Informative)
The sender would "attach" a certain amount of money to the email which the receiver can either cash or return. Example:
- If I want to send my friend an email I don't have to pay him, he knows me and likes me so I'll be on some sort of "white list"
- If I want to send spam I'll need to attach some money so I'm not filtered out (who wants 1 cent emails? you would of course filter these, start with a dollar or so). Now if the receiver doesn't want to buy Viagra he'll cash in the dollar. If you get several spam-mails a day that's easy money!
- If I want to contact someone who doesn't know me, I'll attach 100 dollars and expect that money to be returned as the receiver finds out I'm his long lost brother.
This way you effectively stop spam (or earn cash with it) and it is only a small disturbance.
Please note, this is not my idea, it's Bill Gates'. The above example is my recollection of the example in the book.
Mailing lists (Score:3, Insightful)
If you force the remote machine to do a calculation, pay something or pass a turing test most mailing lists will disappear. If its implemented in some server (lets suppose Hotmail to fix ideas) then all users there that want to join mailing lists wich administrators don't want to afford whatever measure of this kind, well, would have to leave hotmail or open a mailing list account somewhere else.
Using white list could be a solution, but this also could limit the freedom of having your own mailing/distribution list.
And speaking of this, if you server is not ready to pass the MS test (i.e. it requires
how it works *and* stays free (Score:5, Interesting)
So for CPU cycles, here's what I think they are doing:
Every email account has a notion of a "ticket pool". A valid ticket is very expensive to create. Say, it takes 5 minutes to make one on a fast modern machine, at 100% CPU.
When I send an email, a ticket is attached to it. This ticket is required for sending mail (say, through the Hotmail SMTP servers, for example). No ticket, it bounces back to me. When I get a reply to the mail, or perhaps some other sort of acknowledgement from the receiver that they meant to receive the mail, I get credit back for the ticket I used.
In normal circumstances, you almost never have to create new tickets. If you have 10 in your pool, and you are mostly emailing co-workers and friends, you never run out of tickets, and everything acts just like it does today.
However, if you are a spammer, and you want to send 1,000,000 emails per day to people who don't really want to get them, and are never going to reply to your email address (which, to make things worse, probably changes with every batch you send out, to keep yourself anonymous), it's too "expensive" to stay in the spam business. To send 1M unsolicited emails could cost up to 1M tickets, which you may never get credit back for. To generate those would cost 5M minutes on the client machine, which would mean 9.5 years of number crunching, to send one day's worth of email. Clearly not feasible.
Let's say we cut the time per ticket from 5 minutes to 5 seconds. Now, it's almost unnoticeable for normail email usage. An extra 5 seconds to send a mail? Totally not a big deal unless you are mass mailing. But again, to send 1M mails per day, even 5 seconds per mail costs 57.8 *days* worth of CPU crunching. Also completely not feasible.
Sounds like a great plan to me, once all the details I'm glossing over are worked out, but that's what research is for!
The only issue here, that Timothy hit on in a follow-up comment, is that there'd have to be mechanisms for valid mass-email to be sent out. Banks sending statements, Organizations sending email-newsletters, etc. Perhaps there'd be a way to give them a pool with a million tickets, and rely on whatever mechanism was used by the receiver to credit them back after the newsletter was read/received..something like that.
(Ah, the devil is in the details...)
Tricky project to get right, but it could definitely be a win/win.
Re:how it works *and* stays free (Score:2)
Re:how it works *and* stays free (Score:2)
Of course, this might cause problems for mailing lists...
Re:how it works *and* stays free (Score:3, Insightful)
MS isn't the first (Score:2)
It seems to have vanished, the most recent references I could find were a couple of years old.
If you want to research it I recommend searching with e-gold as a keyword.
Says more about Microsoft than about spam (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft: "Hey what if we abolished spam?"
"Screw you! An obvious attempt to embrace and extend!"
M$ wants my money... (Score:2, Insightful)
Clarification (Score:4, Funny)
So, Microsoft is just considering writing an extra inefficient mail protocol?
If Microsoft were doing this... (Score:2)
as usual, MS is coming up with nothing original (Score:2)
I hope Microsoft doesn't add injury to insult by patenting this stuff.
If you want to try it out (Score:2)
Re:Just curious (Score:3, Informative)
You know, just because it's electronic doesn't mean it's free. Mail relays, hosts, etc., still have to pay in time, power, bandwidth, and storage for all the mail that flows around. Isn't it legitimate to at least consider making that cost be borne by the person actually using the resource?
Spam is an example of the Tyranny of the Infinitesimal: Sure, each email is individually nearly cost-less. But together they really stack up the dollars.
Re:Problems left unsolved (Score:2)
Say a medium-sized small business (100 employees) is tired of wasting resources on spam. The whole company starts using this system. Once that happens, and people at that company start spreading the good news about how great it is, other companies start using it internally as well. Eventually, it becomes ubiquitous and the old, broken email protocol ends up where it deserves, in oblivion.
Personally, I could use a system like this right now. I'm a teacher who has to communicate with ~60 students. The problem is, many of them have realized that email is a broken technology, and they resist using it. They never actually check their in-boxes.
Not going to work. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not going to work. (Score:2)
Re:And further... (Score:2)
Re:Why not? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Bogus (Score:2)