Filter This: Email Stamps Could Spell the End of Spam

I was initially thinking similar things as your post. But the more I think about it, (while accepting your conditions of a sufficiently robust secure, reliable system and structure) Leo is not proposing that all email be a paid stamped letter, only the stuff you want to attach value to beyond simply that of your name.

I do concur that mass philonthropy from a spammer would be rare, but nearly acceptable if if came with a penny or dime (or nickel) attached.

Email among close friends could balance itself out moneywise just by passing the dime back in a reply.

I agree with you that it is all money, regardless of size, but that adds to my being convinced all the more that it may really work to reduce spam.

Trying to convince people to do it will be a challenge, granted, but I think a challenge perhaps worthwhile. 

Thanks for the reply, Leo. And it's an interesting comment. But something still doesn't sound terribly right about the idea that people have to pay for stamps to send emails. I think the balance (lack of) will be an issue more or less if one wants to make a case that users don't really pay anything due to "zero balance" with the email stamp system in place. When we're talking cents they don't sound a lot but they're money nonetheless, and if anyone had to pay just to send an email when it's always been simply free, then it would not be easy to convince people that the idea would work. Trying to convince people to adopt email stamp is one thing, but then the system would have to be sufficiently rubust, secure and reliable and have to be managed and maintained, and all of these things are adding up to the complication, and the question is then whether it's worthwhile having the system in place when it's not that necessary for the majority of email users.

I still believe the electronic cash I proposed in this article would be a good candidate. A monetary value would be assigned to digitally encrypted tokens, which can be passed around between individuals without any involvment of a 3rd party or clearinghouse (no transaction fees!). If you think about it, it's really not that much different from normal coins and bills. Now of course if you could just pass around these code strings on USB sticks or in e-mails, you'd probably tempt too many people to copy&paste their fortune. You'd need secure and authenticated e-wallets, which could also be USB devices or chipcards, which I elaborated a bit on in this comment.

If you have a secure transaction protocol, using some type of asymmetric key algorithm, and include a unique transaction ID in the encrypted data that is exchanged, you could easily send the resulting code string in a normal e-mail. The recipient's e-wallet will only accept the transaction with that ID once, so there's no use in copying and pasting the code string. 

Somebody might intercept the code string, and maybe even crack the code to get the money out, but that would be a) just as illegal, and b) an awful lot harder than just copying dollar bills on an ink jet printer.

If a spammer is willing to attach a penny to millions of e-mails, he'd better have a plan to get some business from it, or otherwise be a massively random philantropist. I guess there's a lot fewer of either of those compared to the current amount of spammers.

Thanks for the dime. I hereby send it back to you :-) 

Now the question arises, how do we get it set up to attach pennies nickels dimes and the like to our email?

I am liking the idea more and more, and I do see how the million to one return odds for a SPAM victim no longer hold their value if it cost a million pennies to try for the one victim.

Now on to devil's advocacy: (telegraphed for dramatic effect)
Does simply assigning a monetary value to an email by itself legitimize the content of the offer? Or does it simply move the price of admission for some spammers out of reach and create Spamonopolies of other Spammers who can now somehow legitimize their email by attaching pennies.

Furthermore, does simply replying to an email send a penny back? I can see some very neat programming opportunities for the attached coin purse it would take to legitimize emails digitally. Now it comes to the question again, how do we get the pennies into the coin purse?

For me, I know the model would work because I would send only essential information via the channel that attached $, and I would invite any and all willing to attach funds to send to me. :-)

Leo, I would surely send you a dime for this post. 

 

Hi Viboons, the idea behind it is to put your money where your mouth is. If I have something relevant to convey to you, if I take the time to write you a personal note, those 10 cents are just an acknowledgement of the value that I assign to the message.

If somebody replies to less than half of your e-mails, maybe you're sending too many e-mails.

If a friend argues with you over 50 cents, it may tell you something about the value your friend assigns to your friendship. 

If a friend is sending you more e-mails than you care to answer, but you don't really mind receiving his e-mails, and you don't want to jeopardize your friendship, just reply with 50 cents after receiving five e-mails with 10 cents each.

Hi cjon316, I think the spam business model is that if you can trick one person out of a million you still get a return because sending a million e-mails costs you nothing.

Interesting comment about giving up on money, but I agree it has it's practical value over barter. Just imagine having to carry ten sacks of grain in your wallet, or give change on half a cow - "keep the tip!".

What strikes me as amazing, though, is that people even thousands of years ago have agreed to use rare glittery items as a store of value, even though those items had no practical value whatsoever (even today gold is valued way over it's practical value as a conductor, or diamond as a cutting tool). Ornamental, maybe, but in an age where the availability of food and shelter were not to be taken for granted, I'd call it an enormous leap of faith that someone would exchange food for gold coins, knowing that when the next famine hits those coins have very little nutritional value.

To answer your question on how this could end spam, first of course I'd filter out mail from unknown addresses with no pennies attached. Then you've eliminated the true spam problem, because you can't reach a million people for free anymore to get a return from one victim. There'd still be businesses sending unsollicited commercial e-mails, but they'd make sure to actually have something to offer which might interest you once in a while. Just like today you get print mailings with coupons from Home Depot, Target, etc. And even if it doesn't interest you, you still get to keep the pennies.

I just read the NY Times article "Speech by Gates Lends Visibility To E-Mail Stamp In War on Spam" that was linked to by Leo, and I think it sums up the concept quite well... "The idea has been dismissed both as impractical and against the free spirit of the Internet." Of course, it'd be unwise to leave out any possibilities of tackling the spam but when money's involved (no matter how much) in something that people have been taking for granted for years like free emailing, change won't happen easily.

The article also mentioned about differentiating among classes of e-mail, which is still an ongoing challenge. Waiving charges for friends and relatives is one thing, but the fact is that while email spam is bad, it's not equally bad for everyone. For instance, most noncommercial users (like me) can live with a few spam emails a day in the indox and the minor spam filtering issue, but many businesses can be seriously threaten by the spam.

Perhaps the email stamp concept might be feasible in the commercial case and for charging those who send "large volume of email". In this case, a standard needs to be defined for what is "large volume" and what's not, say, more than 5000 messages a day would be considered large and so gets charged for the stamp, otherwise it's free. And I can't imagine any noncommercial user would send more than that anyway.

And what about the zero sum game, i.e. I send you a message and you send me back keeping the balance at zero. What could be a potential issue here? it's exactly when balance's not maintained and your friend might start to complain something like "hey man, I sent you 11 messages including this one, and you only replied less than half!, are you trying to cheat?"...

I wonder what the motivation is for sending SPAM? I don't believe that the motivation is purely to annoy the receiver, as there must be better things to do than that. BUT if there was a cost to send an email, that may be a slight deterrent.

 The problem then comes from trying to implement such a sweeping change across the whole lot of the internet.

 I've heard it said that a person could give up the idea of money altogether as long as you could get everyone else to give up on money.

 The idea sounds valid from a logical standpoint, as it does attach a commitment to each send. I also think that as long as I have a legitimate option to send mail for free and take my chances (with whether the mail is considered legit) I could even get behind the idea. If I received a penny for each email that hits my box, or a dime or even higher given the importance, I am sure to consider the nuisance of unsolicited mail as lessened.

 I am still trying to grasp how this would end the SPAM as it is defined by unsolicited commercial email. It is a very interesting discussion, nonetheless.

 

Regards and kudos,

CMJ 

Hi, Leo!

That makes sense

I don't quite agree that existing filters and tools are sufficient. I still get unfiltered spam in my inbox, and some legitimate messages end up in my spam bucket.

Then I'm also facing anti-spam measures that make it hard for me to send legitimate mails. Once I was responsible for sending out a monthly newsletter for a local organization I was in, to 100 or so people. First I found that my ISP limited the number of e-mails I could send per day to 30. Then I set up a mail server on my own PC, but found that about half the recipients' ISPs refused mail from an 'unlisted' SMTP server. Finally I managed to send the mails through my web host's SMTP server, but then I found out that many people hadn't received the newsletter, evidently because Bcc:'s were being blocked, as well as messages with more than a dozen or so To: or Cc: addresses.

Recently I've experienced that my Belgian ISP (the local #1 cable provider) is being blacklisted by some US ISPs, so any e-mails I try to send bounce with a very unfriendly message.

Another anti-spam measure that I've been facing recently is that ISPs won't let you connect to other SMTP servers for outgoing mails.  The result is that any time I connect somewhere to the Internet with my laptop I have to reconfigure my e-mail settings to select a different outgoing SMTP server.