How to stop spam: Charge for the stamp

We can now glimpse what had once seemed unattainable: stopping the exorbitant flow of spam at its very source.
The New York Times

The story "How to stop spam: Charge for the stamp" published February 13, 2005 at 1:10 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[wazzledoozle]

Good idea, but..

I dont see how this would work if the spammer was using a very fast computer network. I think a better solution would be a randomly generated math problem in image form that would require you to input the answer to send the message. Computers cant read the text in a blurred image.

That method wouldnt work

the problem with that method, is that there still exists a server to issue that image...

the "mail server" software is available freely... and it would be simple to avoid, just a quick hack and its gone.

most users are used to " i write an email...and forward that to my isp, which it then delivers to the recipients isp , for pickup"

but software is available wich simply skips the middle man, and takes the role of the server itself, and deliver the mail directly to the recipients ISP, thus rendering the "image text" authentication method completely avoided.

[kieranmullen]

Stupid Idea

Companies pay now, so what? That doesnt stop junk mail from comming into my mail box does it?

get GMail then

ive had GMail for 6 months now, and ive not recieved any spam from it... the only spam I get is from people I actually know signing up for one of those "Community" site and inviting me... which cannot be legally called spam.

just a couple of things ive found usefull for other readers out there...
if you _WANT_ to have spam, just keep using crappy hotmail (wich with software you can basically detect if an email address is valid or not without ANY email being sent to the recipient ) and using outlook express, and blindly subscribing to things on the net... if a site doesnt _NEED_ you personal details... dont provide it.

and do _NOT_ forward chainmails on of anykind... all it needs is one spammer to get a copy .. and they get a nice exhaustive list of valid email addresses.
if you _MUST_ forward a chain mail, be curteous, cut out all un-nessecary data out of it, and put all your intended recipients in the "bcc" field so every recipient dosent get a copy of your list

[Catgic]

Please, Not the OPM Solution Again

Shame, shame on you, Randall Stross. As Uncle Ronnie used to say, There you go again and from the NYT too.

Why do all public solutions to public problems always seem to be about money? Invariably its OPM [other peoples money]. The government has a budget problem and, of course, their solution&OPM in the form of another communication tax on Internet hoses. Now an e-Spam problem proposed to be solved by the mothers milk of the bureaucratic thinker, OPM. Somebody always wants the other fellows money to pay to solve their problem.

Mr. Stross should consider giving up journalism and run for Congress. There are many of his U-PAY bedfellows and gals in that tax-rich cluster of elected bureaucrats.

First things first. First stop the snail-mail Spam that arrives daily in and clutters up my USPS approved Home and Biz mail boxes, before taxing e-Spam. The U.S. Post Office was founded back on February 20, 1792 and charges for snail-mail Spam and it hasnt deterred any snail-mail spammers for 213 years.

I have e-mail accounts at the major web providers. I have my Spam filter set to their lowest setting to assure e-mail from some long lost friend doesnt get bounced, and I have NO SPAM PROBLEMA. Their Spam Filtering technology WERKUM GREAT.

Maybe if the Spam complainers would quit clicking on, visiting and soliciting so many PORNO SITES they wouldnt get electronically tagged & bagged there and be receiving so much unsolicited e-Spam.

Randall's journalistic time would be better applied writing about important e-issues, like the personal and e-ramifications of the REAL ID Act.

[aabcdefghij987654321]

Nice rant, too bad it doesn't apply

All that talk about OPM and while the article leads you on and on thinking that they're talking about actual money (which means it's a poorly written article by failing to quickly explain the "cost") it finally explains that the "cost" is in CPU time on the sending PC and not an actual monetary cost.

[mcugaedu]

"Duh!"

Did it really take 30 years to think of this?

Most of what's wrong with the Internet is due to the fact that costs fall on the wrong people. The people who choose to consume resources should incur costs - that's basic economics.

If sending e-mail cost even $0.001 per message, we wouldn't have a spam problem.

[aabcdefghij987654321]

The problem with this idea --

What the originators of this "plan" have failed to account for though is the army of "owned" machines that the spammers are now using will be the ones to bear the "cost" of sending those emails. Since the spammers already don't mind stealing other people's machines to send their waste, they'll not mind forcing their victims to bear the computing cost of such a scheme.

Do it like the phone companies

The way to really make this work is to charge a REAL penny for each email, but have it charged back to the SENDER if the email is accepted, just the way telephones work. Obviously, some kind of working billing system would have to be set up, but since it's been proved this works already with telephones, it should not be an insurmountable obstacle...

[lavacentral]

this idea doesnt work

People can stil send you messeges to your cell phone through the web. All they need to do is know your number and they can use a service like teleflip or just find out host of the number like cingular/tmobile/verizon etc and they would be able to send you tons of txt msgs at your cost.

Small Problem

If the e-mails conform to CAN-SPAM, they are legal. And a licensed ISP is legally required to carry legal traffic. Losing one's license as an ISP might mean no more cheap dial-up access lines or discounts (for resale) on DSL.

Filter, filter filter is the only answer.

This is...

This is just another ploy for someone to make money for something they have no right to make money from. Like all other efforts to stop or slow spam it won't work and I don't think it is fair for people that use spam for real work or real communications to pay for the couple of hundred a**holes that like spam the worlds inboxes with s*it.

The only possible way I might even consider paying $0.01 per e-mail is if the money was collected and kept by my ISP. I care about my ISP and it is their severs and such that have to deal with all of the incoming garbage (not that other servers aren't used either, but they have pay for anti-virus and spam filtering software on their servers). But, even then I am against it.

The other problem is we all know that just like the US and the UK the penny cost of postage won't stay that way. Someone will get gready and pretty soon the cost to send an e-mail will cost as much or more as it does to send a regular letter through the post. Greed always wins and the consumers always loose it has been that way with cable and sat TV services, music CDs and online music and movies and more.

Robert

stamps dont deter junk mail - why would it stop spam?

Spam is an annoying form of advertising, just like all that junk mail you get in your mail box every day. All that junk mail requires postage and still gets through and the volume is growing.

A stamp on email will just mean people pay a tax to use email. It wont stop advertisers from using this shady form of advertising. It will make people that collect postage very rich, which is why microsoft is pushing this non-solution as the only solution.

The way to stop spam is to target the companies that benefit from the advertising. Just follow the money from the spammer to the company paying them to spam. Going after the spammer and not the company paying the spammer does nothing as we have seen with the growth of spam. But go after the legitimate companies that pay for the spam and the spam will dry up.