Chrome Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail Paying for e-mail seen as anti-spam tactic Friday, March 5, 2004 Posted: 11:25 AM EST (1625 GMT) Microsoft's Bill Gates, among others, is suggesting computer users start buying "stamps" for e-mail. 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." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JSngry Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 Bill Gates has officially jumped the shark. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rockefeller center Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 "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. Sonia is aware that we're paying our ISPs, isn't she? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan Gould Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 Bill Gates has officially jumped the shark. Damn. If only the jump fell short. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy Berger Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 This is actually a pretty good plan for getting rid of spam! Guy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rockefeller center Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 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. And because the internet allegedly can't shatter offline class distinctions, there should be online class distinctions too? Drown in your think tank, Sonia! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claude Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 (edited) What if Microsoft used this strategy to make Windows safer? Not by letting the user solve puzzles, but by requesting him to log into his computer with a safe password. Instead Windows users are constantly offered the possiblity to log on automatically (with administrator privileges by default), to save internet passwords on their computer (steal someones notebook and you have access to his email, you can use his credit card data in webstores, etc) and to identify himself on every website with just one (hackable) Passport Edited March 5, 2004 by Claude Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chrome Posted March 5, 2004 Author Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 I still get plenty of junk snail mail, and someone's paying to send that, so I have to wonder how effective this would be ... Does anyone know why Mac's don't get a lot of spam? How do those machines stop it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rockefeller center Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 I still get plenty of junk snail mail, and someone's paying to send that, so I have to wonder how effective this would be ... Does anyone know why Mac's don't get a lot of spam? How do those machines stop it? http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/tec090102.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chrome Posted March 5, 2004 Author Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 Thanks ... although it leaves me with the same question raised in the story: why can't Windows do something similar? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claude Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 (edited) Does anyone know why Mac's don't get a lot of spam? How do those machines stop it? That must be a coincidence. It's the mail account that gets the spam, independently from the computer that you use to download it. Outlook has a spam filter too, but most people don't even know that. Anyway, the best way is to activate a spamfilter on the mailserver itself (the provider). More an more service providers are offering this service). Edited March 5, 2004 by Claude Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chrome Posted March 5, 2004 Author Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 Claude ... check out the link from rockefeller ... and I can tell you, as a Mac user, that this is true ... I'm spam-freee. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
couw Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 (edited) it is very difficult to built an effective spam filter if you receive messages in multiple languages. The technicians at our university have still not managed to do it right. They tag every probably spam message with a string that can be searched and automatically moved to a local folder. Everyday I find several "good" messages filtered out as spam and several spam messages not filtered out. My private mail provider has a filter that discerns three types of messages: good, bad, and dunno. You check the messages the system can't filter correctly as good or bad and thus create and ever growing true-filter that does not just function through search strings, but uses the actual messages (sender, header, content) as criterion. Edited March 5, 2004 by couw Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christiern Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 My macs send all SPAM to a special folder. I could he it sent directly to my trash basket, but not all mass mailings are SPAM, so I do the final filtering myself--very simple. If Windows does not already have such an option in place, give them time--they are generally 2 or 3 years behind the Mac. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jazzmoose Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 If Windows does not already have such an option in place, give them time--they are generally 2 or 3 years behind the Mac. I always knock mac users, but I have to admit this is true. Apple comes up with a great idea, and Gates immediately sets his R&D people (known as the "Rube Goldberg Division") to work coming up with some convoluted, rickety way to approximate the result. I tell you, Apple could have been the biggest software company in the world if they hadn't been locked into their vision as a hardware supplier... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
connoisseur series500 Posted March 6, 2004 Report Share Posted March 6, 2004 This is actually a pretty good plan for getting rid of spam! Guy I doubt it. Have you checked your mailbox lately for junk sent through the postal system? I am opposed to charging for emails. A small charge becomes a bigger charge later on; then we'd have to have it taxed. By the time, we're done with it, the charge would be hefty. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jazzmoose Posted March 6, 2004 Report Share Posted March 6, 2004 Wait a minute, Paul; this really could work! We just need to make a few adjustments... Make Bill Gates pay for any spam anyone receives. I guarantee Microsoft would find a solution fast... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris olivarez Posted March 7, 2004 Report Share Posted March 7, 2004 Ok just what exactly is in it for Bill? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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