Fight spam by donating to your favorite charity. That’s how researchers at Yahoo are hoping to convince people to put a virtual one-cent stamp on their outgoing e-mails. Sending a penny-stamped e-mail through Yahoo’s (not yet released) CentMail program would automatically mark it as “real mail” and get it past any spam filters, Wired reports. As an added incentive, the penny goes to the charity of your choice. Critics argue that it’s only a matter of time before spammers figure out how to make counterfeit stamps. [%comments]
Fight Spam With Pennies
TAGS: incentives, pennies
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Who pays the penny? Yahoo or the sender?
What’s with all the unfounded criticism? Not just the comments, but even the summary needs fact checking.
“Critics argue that it’s only a matter of time before spammers figure out how to make counterfeit stamps.”
Anyone with a basic understanding of modern cryptography can explain several way to prevent counterfeiting.
Or…
“for the price of a penny, wouldn’t it be commercially viable to pay the fee to have your spam-mail automatically approved”
I don’t know where the idea that spam somehow makes more that 1 cent per recipient. Response rates to spam are generally less than 1%. A spammer has to send tens of millions of emails a day to make any money. Since you can’t seem to do the math, that’s millions of dollars per day.
“You cannot selectively penalize email traffic because it would be easy to disguise it as something else,”
How do you fool a mail server into thinking it is receiving something that isn’t mail? All it does is receive mail. If the mail doesn’t have a stamp, it doesn’t get accepted. That’s like saying the post office can’t check for stamps because there are all these other cars on the road with the mail trunks.
And…
“Call me a cynic but I suspect ISP’s, who typically supply email as part of your internet service, would find a good excuse to shove a good deal of this extra revenue into their pockets rather than handing it off to charities.”
This is Yahoo. Yahoo is not an ISP. Yahoo provides webmail. And so what if it doesn’t go to charity? The spam still goes away because it isn’t profitable anymore.
“A better strategy to combat spam would be to lessen the number of botnet computers out on the web”
Don’t you think if we could get rid of the bot nets, we would? That’s like saying it would be better strategy to eliminate all the causes of cancer than work on cancer treatment. An impossible strategy isn’t better.
I would not give the time of day to an ISP, much less more money than I’m already giving them.
I simply don’t trust that they’ll actually get that money to the charities. They’ll lobby Congress for the right to charge administrative fees — and they’ll win.
Great idea, just completely impractical. I’m looking at you, Comcast!
I remember reading once of an idea to charge outgoing mail one penny (or a nickel, or whatever), which would be refunded when the user opened the mail (and didn’t mark it as spam.) If this could work, legitimate e-mail stays free to the end user, and spammers would be on the hook for lots of money, ruining their business model.
@noah (#10): I think the discussion about ISPs was considering what would happen if the proposal were broadened beyond Yahoo! as a mail provider. If such a system turned out to be successful, you can bet your last penny that the ISPs would try to get their paws on it.
How is Yahoo going to get everybody who maintains a spam filter, at the server or client level, to cooperate and flag those messages as “non-spam”? They don’t have the power to force anybody to accept their system.
John Levine put out a white paper about the problems with e-postage some years ago. What’s new here that he hasn’t addressed?
http://taugh.com/epostage.pdf
That’s an interesting white paper. What’s changed is:
(a) the spam problem has become substantially worse.
(b) centmail doesn’t require universal participation to be helpful—it’s partial adoption helps existing infrastructure.
(c) the relative cost of computer/network effort vs human effort has changed by perhaps an order of magnitude since 2004.
centmail is also invulnerable by design to several of the problems mentioned for postage systems. For example, recipients have much less motivation to provoke the sending of email to themselves, because they don’t receive the money.