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." I think this is ridiculous, just another scheme by Microsoft to make billions more..
Bill Gates sucks. There is no way they would be able to keep track of it. Someone would always be cracking the way email was sent.
I hope they don't do it. Then UT would just charge ME more money so they can buy gazillions of E-stamps and send me spam out the wazoo.
really?? spam just isn't a problem for me. i have a personal email address through my firm...and i use an internet based one for with a much more anonymous title for signing in to things like amazon. i have no problem with spam at all...and even if i did, it wouldn't be significant enough to ask for a fee each time i send an email within my office. that's just ridiculous. another cost of doing business that business is forced to pass along with little real value to show for it.
Can you explain why? What do email servers do that cost that much money? Anyone with an IP address and an email server can do this. How do you expect the government to keep tabs on everyone that sends email? Do you really think that it will make a big difference in how email is sent?
Many companies that ultilize bulk emailers already pay a fee to send out their emails (by hiring out companies to do the emailing for them). It's already not free to them, but they're willing to pay for it. Adding another $10,000 per million emails to the bill may not make a significant dent in the spam issue at all. But it could easily keep regular folks (even when the cost is very low) from communicating as much as they already are. Plus, I'd hate to be the person who'll have to pay for hijacked email or the result of viruses or hackers or whathaveyou. And I imagine it would just make companies less responsive, and potentially make them take out some level of internet business.
Is the government going to provide email service. Stamps aren't a tax, they're payment for a service. This looks like a backdoor way of sneaking in the first internet tax.
I guess people don't understand how to create multiple email accounts. I have several. 1. very personal - family and close friends only 2. work account 3. accounts - clutchfans, amazon, pizza hut etc. 4. junk - quick sign-ins to places where you wiill never be back I even have a separate account for my resume. It would suck if I had to pay extra becasue of others email mismanagement.
also, you can send a file through instant messages, aol, icq, etc... so i dont think there is any way at all they could keep track of it all. wouldnt the people who bought servers and run their own email be violated? technically the person/company who owns the server is the party with something to lose or gain right?
First off, the Bill Gates just suggested a concept for reducing spam - it's just brainstorming and, as pointed out by others on this board and in the artilce, there are many hurdles to overcome to make that concept work. However, he's absolutly correct in the fact that, because e-mail is free, spam is so prolific. On the other hand Direct (snail) mail and direct marketing are pretty cheap which is why we get so much junk mail and so many telephone solicitations. This leads me to believe that even if e-mail costs some token amount of money it won't totally eliminate spam as paying for advertising has been around for years. Paying money for e-mail might even make spam harder to eliminate in the long run as sections of the economy would grow dependant on money earned from spammers. It's why bulk mail will never go away - the post office makes too much money from it. Here's my idea: 1. Require any bulk mail senders to include code in the message that end users or sys-admins could use to filter out the message. In other words, your e-mail server or client would have a check-box that would allow you to accept or reject mail with said code. If you send bulk mail without the code you are liable for criminal prosecution. It will cost bulk-mail senders NOTHING to put this code in their messages. 2. Make a law that requires bulk-mail senders to send mail from their servers and not through relays (unless they have an agreement with the SMTP relay that is trackable). If they send mail through a relay without permission or the relay owner's knowledge make them liable for criminal prosecution. 3. Make it illigal to allow your mail server to act as an open relay. If it is determined that you are running one you get a warning and after that a fine. It's not hard to find open relay SMTP hosts; spammers find them all the time. Plus if you get spam it's easy to see which mail server sent it. Even if someone brought a relay online temporarily you could track the IP address and therefore the user who put it up. Since the Internet is international some countries (i.e. Russia or Korea) might not want to adopt the "require the code on bulk e-mail" or the "don't allow open relay" laws. Fine. Simply make the blocks of IP address that those countries use public (technically they already ARE public, I'm just suggesting having some master list that's easily accessable) and let sys-admins block e-mail from the whole lot. It would mean that legitimate e-mail from those countries wouldn't come through but I bet after enough complaints from legitimate businesses in those countries they (the countries) would succumb and pass the laws I've suggested. Is it foolproof? No. But it's an idea.
How hard is it to set up a Spam guard? Most of the spam is filtered into this in my yahoo email. Sure a few get through, but it just takes a few clicks to delete. It took longer to type this message than it does to delete the spam in my email.
That's fine for individual users, but it anti-spam software costs lots of moneys for companies (licensing issues) not to mention the overhead incurred on the server for the software to look at the incomming mail, evaluate whether it's spam or not and then take appropriate action. If you are the mail administrator for a medium size (or larger) company spam can be a nightmare (especially when some users complain that they didn't get mail that the software thought was spam but it really wasn't). Sometimes, in order to keep performance at an acceptable level, you have to put the anti-spam software on another computer that filters the mail before it actually gets to the e-mail server. All of this takes time and money. Sometimes it take a lot of time and a lot of money.
No one would be discussing this as a serious proposal if it didn't come out of Bill Gates' mouth. And, even then, reading it, I don't see how this idea is remotely tenable.
The way to avoid SPAM overload, is to use a number of different emails. I use one for my closest friends and family, and another for organizations (where I don't know if my email addresss will be given away or sold). I use about 4 emails. One has never gotten a spam email and has been used for about 4 years.
Spam used to be an pain in the ass to me, almost every single one of my e-mail box was flood with p*rn and penis enlargement ads (which of course, is useless to me ) , till I start use earthlink, it allows you to open up to 10 accounts, so whenever I have to fill out my e-mail information, I always carefully select the one that I only use for sign up stuff. Now I rarely have any spam at all.
I never get spam sent to my inbox. I do get it in my bulk mail folder which I just check periodically, and i just delete them....they better not charge crap!!
