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.
WTF? That just sounds stupid. I’d rather get a few easily deletable spams than have to solve a silly puzzle everytime I wanted to send a mail.
the solution should be about eliminating spam, not giving up on it and trying to work around the problem as if it was inevitable. I like Cless’ suggestion.
Over half of email sent is spam, and it will probably be over 75% in the near future. Most of it comes from mail relays on hijacked web servers. Automated port scanners run all day, checking for open relays, hitting every possible IP address. When found, the spammers just plug the relay address in their spam tools, and with a few mouse clicks, send email to the millions of addresses the spambots have compiled from web crawling over the years. If software companies would focus on building secure relays (and products in general), it would severely cut down on their ability to distribute.
Spam is big business. I read that spammers expect one response (site visit) for every thousand emails they send. I have no idea what their commission rates are, but if they send a million emails per day, it adds up to a good buck quickly.
Email stamps? Completely impossible in the current environment. You have billions of emails flying around every day, coming from UNIX, Windows, IBM Mainframes, and thousands of different types machines. Integration of an electronic ‘postage’ system would require millions of computers to be inventoried, entered into a master email database, and somehow billed for the volume of email they send. You’re talking $US billions in funding just to set up the infrastructure for such a beast. There would be outages and problems caused by the system…just imagine the lawsuits, billing disputes, etc. Impossible. For it to happen, ~every~ ISP on the planet would have to get together and agree to implement the new standards. Not going to happen.
Also, Microsoft or some other congomerate could create a new mail protocol and charge people to use it. But I really doubt people are going to jump on that bandwagon anytime soon. Especially considering it would have to exist parallel to the current network.
Bottom line - secure email relays will start curing the problem. Not more money for Bill.