Stop e-mail spam

Bring back the 1 cent postage

[mayor]

Please, ISP's please, start charging 1 cent for each e-mail sent. That will put a stop to spam e-mail.

It's not unusual for me to get 5-10 copies of the same spam e-mail. And why not if the spammer can belch them out for free!

[vincevincevince]

so, i run my own mailserver... who do i pay? myself?

i send email validation emails out for a free community site... i must pay to ensure my addresses are properly opt in?

i live in [far away developing world country]... how do I pay? i don't have a credit card or cheque book - is yahoo mail going to honour my national coin sent by snailmail?

my mailserver accepts mail for my domain from john's mailserver, as it should. shouldn't *I* get some of the money from those 1 cent emails? after all - i'm providing bandwidth and hardware to allow them to go through.

my ISP decides to show it is antispam and implements a 1 cent charge. 90%+ of the ISPs customers will be lost within a month.

i think this is a start of a good idea - but i can't see it working.

[chiyo]

i've always thought this is a good idea. but vince*3 has outlined some of the practical problems. sure if the main ISP's and email provdiers like yahoo/aol/msn etc etc did it, it would cut down on some (a small proportion but not the real professional guys who are sending out the great majority). But lots of spam email uses open relays or servers set up for the purpose with various cloaking techniques set up to hide the real sender.

To me even a cost of 0.01 cents would be effective given the economics of the business, and this cost could easily be absorbed for those using email as it should, but how could you do this for the millions of private servers in the world where the great majority of spam is coming from?

[mayor]

In my simplistic way of looking at things, couldn't there be a tollboth set up on the Internet backbones where the sender has to pay 1 cent for their e-mail to pass?

Ticket agents could operate in developing countries, collecting funds in local currency and buying blocks of tollboth passes on an international exchange.

How much is it costing the data pipes if they don't do something? Spam e-mail is cosuming tremendous Internet bandwidth and someone has to pay for it.

Heh, and wouldn't it be fun to see all that virus-generated e-mail traffic be channeled right into the byte bucket for failure to pay?

[chiyo]

mayor. im all for positive ideas on how to may PPemail work! The major problem could be privacy concerns i guess, as it would have to involve more monitoring. The other prob is diff currency values. 1c is Us is acceptable but in much of the othe 90% of the world it could be more significant.

I like the idea. And your point about how much it is costing networks already means there is some room to spend money to decrease it.

In fact if everybody in the work paid 1c for every email they send and it goes to a fund we could probably put a dent in world poverty program funding problems in one go!

[thewebboy]

Its a nice idea but it would never work. First off nobody wants to pay per e-mail no matter what ammount. Second, who gets the money? Third, it wouldn't stop spam (if there are less spam messages there will be a few guys willing to pay 1 cent per e-mail without the competition.)

The thing that really needs to happen (but probably wont) is a rewrite of the current e-mail system to prevent e-mail spoofing and other michivious methods.

[vincevincevince]

maybe we are not being selfish enough here...

each one of us here has a number of personal email accounts, and quite possibly their own mail server(s). in a selfish viewpoint, all we want to do is to protect OUR corner from spam.

it _would_ be possible to set up a domain for buying email credits to use if you need to send email to the webmasterworld-member-conglomerate mailservers. you would then have an encrypted token string which you'd paste into the email body - and our server would match that string against your email address and name (and possibly IP?) to prevent fraud. if the email doesn't have the string, then bounce it with a message explaining the system. income less costs (including development costs) should go to charity (or a proportion of it). credits could be earnt in other ways as well - but only ways which cannot be automated and are of some benefit to someone - eg online surveys or something (would fix the no income problem).

as for our clients - they would have to be optin (or optout) of the scheme - it would be an extra service, however i can see some clients not liking it. we'd also have to allow them to put in customised "freepost" address rules - e.g. *@theirdomain.com, [e-mail] etc..

finally - with proper validation (karma based? legal contract?) commerial entities could eventually be exempt from charges in return for not sending spam (as defined by us)...

[killroy]

Well, firstly, the money of course goes to the recipient. You don't pay to send th email, you pay to have it recieved. You can send all you want, but the recipient will never accept it unless it got the postage on it.

And of course with usage of white lsits it would be very practical. You only have to pay to have your email send to somebody who doesn't explicitly want ti. It's opt in all the way :)

So my friends and my newsletter supscriptions are on my white list and don't pay.

So my boddy from a poor country doesn't pay, but the nigeria spammer does, and if he can't afford it, he's gotta scam somebody first to get the cash ;)

Verification of whitelists has to be in a handshake format as current email systems are to spoofable. When I get a message claiming to be from my good friend on my whitelist, My email client sends an email asking for confirmation to his address. If his email client confirms, I get to see the message. Otherwise it
silently disapears.

Payment methoid of course is a big problem, but perhaps we could have single use 1cent digital tokens (4096 bits, perhaps)

This could even be private. A private company makes the tokens and creates the clients. And defines th estandards taht other email clinets can follow to join in the system.

And maybe, it just keeps every houndreth 1cent stamp for itself as fee. Of course you can use your recieved stamps again to send out your own messages.

SN

[victor]

One to to stop most spam without a payment system:

My ISP gets an email for me from [e-mail]. It looks up widets.com in DNS files and sends back a verification request using a hash digest of the email.

If widgets.com denies sending it, then it is probably spam and can be discarded or shunted to a "probable spam from a faked address" folder.

If widgets.com accepts responsibility for sending, it probably isn't spam. At the very least, I know who really did send it and can initiate a claim (assuming appropriate legal things are in place) against widgets.com for UCE.

If widgets.com have been hacked and bad guys used their server to ship spam, I can still claim -- let's hope widgets.com have the right insurance cover to pay for such an event. The insurance company, with all their worldwide financial and legal muscle, can go after the spammer for cost recovery.

Finally, if widgets.com (or their ISP) are not using the verification protocol needed, my ISP flags the email as suspect, and my filters do whatever they want with it. Once a few large ISPs are verifiying emails, there will be a considerable pressure for them all to do.