E-mail postage

I was thinking of the same thing.... each ISP could allow a certain number of emails for free. The problem is that I think spammers (hackers anyway) can get into my account and send stuff that seems to be coming from me. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr

It is enough to make you want to go back to pen & paper.

Hmmm, OK I created one now & it didn't ask me for credit card info either. That's good news for me. About 2 to 3 months ago I tried the same thing & Yahoo's site said they were sorry for any inconvinience but that they'd started requiring credit card info to set up a free email account, even though they wouldn't be charging you anything (they made that clear).
I guess it was a short-lived policy, and even at that time they may have only been requiring it from visitors outside the States or something. Dunno. <shrug>

Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail
Friday, March 5, 2004 Posted: 11:25 AM EST (1625 GMT)



NEW YORK (AP) -- If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying "stamps" for e-mail.
Many Internet analysts worry, though, that turning e-mail into an economic commodity would undermine its value in democratizing communication. But let's start with the math: At perhaps a penny or less per item, e-mail postage wouldn't significantly dent the pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a day. Not so for spammers who mail millions at a time.
Though postage proposals have been in limited discussion for years -- a team at Microsoft Research has been at it since 2001 -- Gates gave the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Details came last week as part of Microsoft's anti-spam strategy. Instead of paying a penny, the sender would "buy" postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender's good faith.
Time is money, and spammers would presumably have to buy many more machines to solve enough puzzles. The open-source software Hashcash, available since about 1997, takes a similar approach and has been incorporated into other spam-fighting tools including Camram and Spam Assassin.
Meanwhile, Goodmail Systems Inc. has been in touch with Yahoo! Inc. and other e-mail providers about using cash. Goodmail envisions charging bulk mailers a penny a message to bypass spam filters and avoid being incorrectly tossed as junk. That all sounds good for curbing spam, but what if it kills the e-mail you want as well?
Consider how simple and inexpensive it is today to e-mail a friend, relative, or even a city-hall bureaucrat. It's nice not to have to calculate whether greeting grandma is worth a cent. And what of the communities now tied together through e-mail -- hundreds of cancer survivors sharing tips on coping; dozens of parents coordinating soccer schedules? Those pennies add up.
"It detracts from your ability to speak and to state your opinions to large groups of people," said David Farber, a veteran technologist who runs a mailing list with more than 20,000 subscribers. "It changes the whole complexion of the net."
Goodmail chief executive Richard Gingras said individuals might get to send a limited number for free, while mailing lists and nonprofit organizations might get price breaks.
But at what threshold would e-mail cease to be free? At what point might a mailing list be big or commercial enough to pay full rates? Goodmail has no price list yet, so Gingras couldn't say. Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers, said spammers are bound to exploit any free allotments.
"The spammers will probably just keep changing their mailbox names," Cerf said. "I continue to be impressed by the agility of spammers." And who gets the payments? How do you build and pay for a system to track all this? How do you keep such a system from becoming a target for hacking and scams?
The proposals are also largely U.S.-centric, and even with seamless currency conversion, paying even a token amount would be burdensome for the developing world, said John Patrick, former vice president of Internet technology at IBM Corp.
"We have to think of not only, let's say, the relatively well-off half billion people using e-mail today, but the 5 or 6 billion who aren't using it yet but who soon will be," Patrick said.
Some proposals even allow recipients to set their own rates. A college student might accept e-mail with a one-cent stamp; a busy chief executive might demand a dollar.
"In the regular marketplace, when you have something so fast and efficient that everyone wants it, the price goes up," said Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute, a think tank that favors market-based approaches.
To think the Internet can shatter class distinctions that exist offline is "living in Fantasyland," Arrison said. Nonetheless, it will be tough to persuade people to pay -- in cash or computing time that delays mail -- for something they are used to getting for free.
Critics of postage see more promise in other approaches, including technology to better verify e-mail senders and lawsuits to drive the big spammers out of business.
"Back in the early '90s, there were e-mail systems that charged you 10 cents a message," said John Levine, an anti-spam advocate. "And they are all dead."


I have no doubt that if there was a will an answer to the spam problem could be found which would not entail milking the public. However, why bother when a simple solution can be found and a Buck made at the same time.

The nicest solution I've seen proposed so far is that the recipient of any e-mail makes his mail server charge an entry fee for every e-mail sent -- say five cents. He can have a whitelist of people he knows, and anyone on that whitelist doesn't have to pay.

That way, my friends don't pay anything; serious businesses who want to get in touch with me can do so, pay five cents for the first e-mail and nothing beyond that, because I put them on my white list after that. A spammer who now sends out a million e-mails for almost nothing, pays $50,000 for every e-mail sent.

Because the price tag on the mailboxes is defined by their owners, not a central authority, the system cannot be used to erect toll booths on the information highway. I really like this concept.

Same here Thomas, and IMO that's the only way SPAM can be controlled.

The procedure I've heard of is slightly different. All users would be able to email for free unless the recipient rejects it.

So if somoen changes their email address tehy don't have to pay for their new emails to their aquaintences but if someone get's spam they can bill the spammer.

But I like the whitelist for another reason. Sites like Able2Know would simply stop sending the resquested email updates altogether if there were no way to check against the whitelist.

There would ahve to be a way to check for the whitelist before sending the email. Otherwise it's open up a danger for email updates like the ones here.

We never send CAUSE here but we do send thousands of requested emails. There's no way I'd send them if that could mean financial liability so the system would have to be set up so that the whitelist can be checked. The user would have to whitelist the emails from here in order to request that we send them.

But IMO this is all a pipe dream and will not happen with the email format (requires all ISPs to be on board because if one isn't all the spammers will go there). Perhaps a new format will implement it.

I just realized that I made a mistake: In my example two posts ago, the spammer pays $50,000 for the whole million of e-mails, not each of them as I said.

I wouldn't be as pessimistic as Craven is about pipe dreams like his and mine. If all but one ISP implement them, all spammers will go to that ISP, but all the users will leave that ISP so the spammers have noone to spam but each other.

But Thomas, email works across ISPs?

All the other ISPs would ahve to block that ISP's mail. And the net isn't very well setup for this.

IMO a change like this requires broad participation. It's contingient on someone billing the spammer and holding them accountable. If one decides not to hold them accountable they'll all go there and send mail to us on the "good" ISPs.

Blocking the bad ones will be difficult with the internet's current structure. IMO it'd be easier to introduce a new protocol.

It's always a balance bewteen how open it is (for use, as in open source and open protocols) and how well it can be secured.

I envision a future of computing where more secure platforms and protocols coexist with the open/dangerous ones.

I have to quibble re that a penny an email isn't onerous. It is borderline onerous for me, who pays for dsl instead of, oh, new shoes, and I am well off compared to many everyday email posters, even as I struggle. The assumptions early in the thread that a few dollars don't matter, are negligible, are borne of - I opine - a poster's present freedom from worry about accumulated pennies. For me who posts about 500 emails a month it might kick me back to dial up, gag, and for others it might prevent activity, a chill toward those sans hefty bank accounts. Not good. Given that the offense is not from the average email sender.

But do you think your recipients would flag your emails as spam?

All the plans I've heard discussed would only bill for the email if the recipient rejects it.

Oh, thanks; I did see that mentioned as a possibility a few posts ago, but didn't catch on that all of them would work that way. Earlier in the topic I saw batches of posts seeming to discount that a penny an email could be a burden on ordinary folks... or I thought I did. Perhaps I read too fast.

<checking>

IMO none of this will become a reality so any of the ideas thrown out are really on equal footing. But the ideas coming from folk like Gates center on free email as long as the recipient doesn't flag it as spam.

So the recipient gets to bill for spam they receive.

Since email is "postage paid by sender AND recipient" by it's nature already I really like the idea. But I doubt it will take hold.

I hope I'm wrong, Gates said spam will be "solved" in a few years. I'll wait and see.

I see, I didn't read closely enough.

I know I ain't holdin' my breath.