Stamps for your e-mail

that sucks. i hope it doesnt happen cuz then i will just chat. >

What is the internet world coming too?

That's so funny.

It stinks that we have to pay to get rid of the spam, but anti spam software is raking in the bucks already. Either way they are gonna get our money. I hope there is a better option cause my money will either go to some politicians pocket or to the pestering spammers. >

i'd have to wait to see how this developes. there are many different ways to look at it. i don't mind the idea of a penny a stamp because its true, i wouldn't send more then 2 or 3$ a month (thats 200 emails! - and i get about 15 a day and send probboly 8 on my own). a spammer system having to buy postage would have to put out much more then that.

but then there is the other side.. like telemarketing, spammers probobly have the budjets to back up blowing 100$ a month on emails. so thats 10,000 emails. it might not be enough to stop them. and internet is already getting expensive - you pay so much, then have postage on top of that?

the idea of putting riddles or math problems to 'secure' an email would get taken out by programs that hack or computer the things on their own.

and they point out developing communities who even a penny a day adds up.

regardless of how serious everybody takes this article, the fact is: its your world, its your internet, and this stuff is going to start happening underneath you unless you step up to the plate about it. simple fact is, if you have an idea - email your state representative. put the system to use and express your concerns and you'll see lawmakers making their decisions based on your input.

_end fact

in my own opinion, i see laws and restrictions going in to stop spammers having more effect then imposing tarrifs on the humble community. and email has been getting mroe secure. you can stop all spam by limiting the people you get email from, if you're a low end internet user. it only takes a phone call to someone to set up with your email addie for future emails

So, who gets the penny? Don't tell me Bill does. He already gets enough of our money. Don't tell me the government does. Which government? I don't see any solution for this. IMHO it can’t work.

i suppose they would divise a system where its split up into municipalities.. you can have a starbucks internet account and log in wherever you want, just debucts from your credit card. they could set something like that up to bill from anywhere. who gets it? there was speculation about an ISP doing it but - that wouldnt work either because there are isp's run out of people's living rooms. dunno. just keep an eye on it.

You do realise that in most cases, the cost of these proposed "stamps" is computing time, not money don't you?

The idea is to make sending e-mail more computationally expensive so that it becomes economically unviable to send millions of e-mails with a <1% return rate.

For individuals, the only "cost" would be a 10-60 second delay when you send an e-mail - which given the asynchronous nature of the communication medium, will hardly ever be noticable.

There COULD be a financial cost if the software to do this stuff isn't just bundled with the next generation of e-mail clients, or if MS (or Goodmail Systems Inc in the article) managed to come up with a proprietry "standard" which they can then turn into a revenue stream, but in principal, everyone here has ample computing reources for their own e-mail "stamps", and I for one don't plan to worry about this...it's more something to look forward to - as long as it's not circumvented before it even gets established.

There's no reason that the actual money version of stamps should be necessary or desirable...if someone tries that, I will predict now that it will fail as people just won't choose to use it.

Someone (if not MS) will develop an open system which will be computationally expensive, but financially free....eventually.

Hum, the idea wouldn't be that bad if it worked. I would be ready to pay 1 cent per email if it really got rid of spam.  But I'm not sure it would. Computing time? Hum, that's another idea I guess I could live with it.

I am very open to make many concessions to get rid of that pest that spam has become. I can receive 50 to 100 spam emails per day. And I mistakenly have d good emails because of it. When I open Outlook in the morning, I typically skim over very quickly the 50+ emails coming in, then I click on the first one, shift, click on the last one, then press . I hate junk mail, I hate junk mail...

Hum, the idea wouldn't be that bad if it worked. I would be ready to pay 1 cent per email if it really got rid of spam.

Well, having to pay 37 cents (and always climbing) for a letter hasn't rid us of junk mail. As a matter of fact, those junk mailers get price breaks for their bulk mailing. Grrrrrr....... There oughta be a law. >

I can see it now......... just pay the feds a cut of the cost of emailing spam, and how long do you think it will take for them to approve of imposing a cost on email, and thereby enabling a federally sponsered spam scam. It's only a matter of time........

Dabe (feeling rather cynical today....)

indeed, they talk about computing time to authenticate email. but even there lies a problem for the small man. far too often im rushing to email something out at work either during crisis or deadline.. and the LAST thing i want to do is sit and click around for an extra 60 seconds just to get the email off to several people. call me impatient. but if you're frustrated/tired and just want to get back to your other tasks, that would proboboly give me stroke.

wasn't there a time in internet history when people did have to pay a per email fee? I seem to recall that, and also recall that companies that advertized they would not charge for email seperately ended up getting everyone's business. I suppose if it did come to pay per email, people could boycott email all together and find another way to send mail.I'm sure there's another way,..other than pay per snail mail. just a matter of someone figuring it out.no?

I first started using email in '84 and I have never had to pay anything to send an email. Maybe what you are referring to was specific to a particular service.

rocky Nimda , yes I'm sure it was a particular service. I think the ones who were charging per emailfee, were mom and pop isps.I was in Ct at the time and there were very few isps available then.also, when mom and dad moveddown here, the internet providors they had charged a lump sum fee for email per month. if you went over what they assigned for email service you had to pay per email overage charge.
the company I refer to down here(delaware) is no longer in business.

You know, they may put this into effect, and most people would use it, but like nearly everything else out there, I bet there will be a workaround..
So, if the whole point is to stop spammers, what happens when spammers get ahold of or work out the workaround for it? Spam still happens, and tons of people have to pay for something completely useless..

ok any body think abt viruses ?
i mean lets say they set it up to deduct .10 cents (by credit card for example) for every sent e mail. what if a virus gets a hold of your e mail and goes crazy? ...
it would be an incentive for spammers to become virus wrighters ? i mean heck theyd get their e mails sent for free? or should i say wed be paying for them to infect our pcs and create spam?..

its just a thought .. u know if theres a will, they will find a way .....just some food for thought ...

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I think that email should stay free. It is one of the few things left in this world that is worth being free. I would stop using it if I had to pay for it. A real letter is much more personal, and a phone call is much more worthwhile. I have very little problems with spam because of the precautions I take. I understand that not everybody has the same email server as mine (and I find mine to be excellent most of the time). However people need to learn to think smarter rather then taking the easy way out. Postage on normal mail is to pay the postal workers. There is no entity I would be paying if I payed for emails. Email filters can be better, it is just a matter of time before they do get better. Until then be strong, don't give in to the easiest path. Wait for the light.

DesignCaddy - the computing time overhead would take place in the background. There is no reason it would keep you from getting on with the next task...it just means the e-mail won't leave your e-mail program for a minute. Of course, if the next thing you need to do is shut down your machine, or re-boot, then it would delay you, but that's not going to affect many people very often.

HG_Eliminator - Viruses are an issue, though more likely trojans in this case, as it's already been highlighted that a lot of spammers use zombie machine (belonging to someone else but hacked and controlled by them) to send their spam now. If that is the only practical route for them to send spam in future then they'll redouble efforts to compromise more machines.

...which is why computer security generally also needs to be improved for these measures to work, and MS and others are working on developments in that sphere too...though, cynically I don't expect them to do a good job of it.

kongit - on the contrary, there are resources used when you send e-mail equivelent to the postal worker, and there has been an argument from some quarters for people to pay for bandwidth used rather than a flat rate ISP charge for some time. The owners of various transatlantic pipes at one stage were threatening to impose a bit-tax on trafic they carry for instance...the equipment, cables and people needed to keep the infrastructure of the Internet running is not free, we just happen to pay for it via ISP fees at the moment.

These argumants seem to have almost disappeared at the moment thankfully, so I don't expect e-mail charges or even bandwidth usage charges to come in...and most people looking at the idea of e-mail stamps have no intention of it being a financial cost.

E-mail filters are destined to fail ultimately as spammers can (and have to date) always reverse engineer them to circumvent them in creative ways...the same is true in a parallel way for anti-virus software. Anyone who thinks that having the latest a/v software is 100% protection is fooling themselves for example.

glad we got a good discussion out of it.

to reiterate what ive said before, as with many others ive taken a few simple precautions that have cut down on the amount of spam and virus i net. one of the most important steps is simply not listing your email out in the open. for example, the second i had put a 'mailto:webmaster' link on my company's website, my inbox started getting bombarded with spam. there are bots that crawl the internet looking for addresses. you can avoid this by embedding the address in php or java code, but admittingly on my own website i have the address out in the open. luckily its not a site that is trafficed as much as others. second, there are a few small and very efficient programs that effictively block email. my hotmail box doesn't get any spam anymore - i dont know what MS did but they did a wonderful job - it was like turning off a light switch. i use Norton at home, and its done a fantastic job. i'm told mozilla has built in protections as well.

i believe the situation is getting better, however it will be a while before the safeguards and common knowlege catch up with the spam pouring in all over the world. something to remember is if you're not one who wants the whole world to openly contact you - simply don't post your email around everywhere, don't have it jutting out on a website, and then set your inbox to only accept mail from people on your own list. then you can coordinate with people to begin sending you messages. if anyone has any more ideas please share them

The computational idea isn't bad.
Have you ever gone to sign up at a site and part of the process is to enter the 'code'. That code is usually what appears to be a random gif or jpg of a string of numbers or letters.
Suppose sending email worked the same. When you click 'send', then you have to enter the 'code'. Seems it would stop the automated mailers that the spammers use.

Thats a cool idea, Pictoratus.

really good idea... nice.

pictoratus - not a bad idea, but that would involve human interaction at the stage of the client=> server exchange, and the idea is to limit the impact on the users time.

Effectively the same sort of thing would happen with "stamps" but it would be your computer that has to "interpret" what the server is challenging it to "read"...and to do that, it has to decode something which is designed to be computationaly hard...Only then would the server issue a stamp and accept the e-mail to forward it on for you.

The problem with spam is that once you end up on some lists, it's almost impossible to fight. I used to maintain a spam free in box for months at a time using as many precautions as anyone, and then I suspect that someone maliciously added my address to a spam harvesting site, and since then I've had more and more slipping past the 4 or 5 different layers of filters the place I work operates [me]*sigh*[/me]

What about companies that send legitmate spam? Like the WinCustomize Newsletter, if you signed up, they have the right to send it to you. Same goes for any informational newsletter, or anything that involves an automated email response, like Amazon.com emailing you your invoice, or anything like that. E-mail does consist of more than just letters from person-to-person, you have to figure in these kinds of issues. So I don't see how "stamps" of any kind, whether it be computational or typing in a code will work. Paying for it on the other hand won't stop any email from being sent...it will just cost money. I can very much see that happening in the future, when there is no more postal mail aside from deliveries of goods.