1¢ E-Mail?

2

Comments

  • Reply 21 of 55
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by piwozniak

    0.01 is actually a lot. How many e-mails do you send/month?



    As I suggested earlier, billing for e-mails could, along with other reforms, take a big bite out of spamming without costing you a single penny, simply by having a free e-mail allowance that applies before the 1¢/message fee kicks in.



    Some study of e-mail usage should be done to come up with a more solidly-grounded number, but I'd guess that a free allowance of 1500 outgoing e-mails per month would be more than enough for most users. That's around fifty outgoing messages per day. Perhaps your ISP wouldn't even bother to bill you until the excess over your limit reached a full dollar or more -- especially if you had pre-paid internet access and a separate billing was needed to collect the e-mail fee.



    While easily being enough free outgoing e-mail for most users, 1500 messages isn't that useful at all for a spammer, who needs to hit hundreds of thousands of users, if not millions, just to get a handful of responses.
  • Reply 22 of 55
    true, that would work...

    hmmm
  • Reply 23 of 55
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Stroszek

    And what about places like AppleInsider? I don't post here a lot, but this month alone, I've received 11 emails notifying me of responses to threads that I have replied to. What about the people who post more than me? Would Brad (no offense, Brad) have really been worth the $1,000,000 that it would have taken to notify him of every response to his 7900+ posts? [/B]



    You've identified a thorny problem here, but the problem isn't that you'd have to worry about being billed for all of those e-mails to Brad.



    It's the people who run AppleInsider who would have to worry. While you're the one who kicks off an automatic notification to Brad, by replying to one of his posts, as far as an ISP's SMTP server is concerned, the folks who run the AppleInsider web server are the customers who are sending that e-mail, and who would be billed for it.



    There are plenty of non-profit/low-profit web sites that generate tons of automatic e-mail, and those sites could be hard hit by per-message charges.



    Here's a possible solution that could be managed without too much modification of spam-filtering software or web site software:



    Have a loophole in the per-message billing scheme. Don't count, and don't charge for, messages that meet certain very strict criteria. These always-cost-free messages would be required...
    • To have specific wording in the subject line, and/or in an embedded header, that would indicate that the message is an automated response.

    • To indicate the message's origin by e-mail address, domain, or other recipient-recognized key.

    • To include a valid "Reply-to:" header, recognized as valid by the ISP.

    • To be very short (1K? 4K?), to be free of binary attachments, and to be either HTML-free plain text, or limited to very simple HTML with no image tagging or other references to external objects.

    Once these criteria were established, personal junk mail filters could easily be configured to recognize these cost-free e-mails, and users could easily adjust their filters to only accept automated responses for web sites that they were expecting to get messages from.
  • Reply 24 of 55
    jwilljwill Posts: 209member
    Well (I think this was previously said), I think it would work if you weren't allowed to go over a certain amount without paying a cent for it..depending on how many you send a month (I don't send many..probably less than 20, or even 10!)



    Since spam is sent out in such large numbers, it would have to lower its amount, unless payments would have to be made. So from that perspective, it is a good idea.



    Lol, a funny part to me is that we'd be seeing e-mail costs fly up for some people just like cell phone bills!
  • Reply 25 of 55
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    I think it's a waste of time to rail against a proposal for a mandatory $.01 email fee. Obviously, no fee based email system will ever be mandatory.



    Also, focusing specifically on the overly simplistic fee of 1-penny-per-email is a waste of time. Again it's obvious that people will only adopt a system that actually provides a service such as the filtering of spam.



    It seems that detractors normally have a knee-jerk reaction against ePostage. Typically, this leads to them arguing against an obviously flawed postage system instead of looking at the ones which they might actually like.



    You see... I've had this conversation literally hundreds of times while debriefing participants in our 'Markets for Attention' experiments.



    One penny per email sent is not the only conceivable postage scheme.



    A far more popular postage system is as follows:

    On your secure (spam filtered) email account you can have a list of people from which to receive messages with no postage. These messages will rely on header based public/private key pairs. Messages from ?strangers? will require the sender to pay an amount postage which you yourself have specified. If a message turns out to be non-spam, you can click the refund button and possibly even the 'add to free list' button.



    Here's the kicker, recipients could also get a cut of the postage.



    There are many systems that requires less work, provide filtering, greater privacy, and are actually profitable for email recipients. Not bad aye? There really isn?t a downside since normal email could be run along side a postage requiring InBox.



    There are also technical hurdles to wide spread adoption besides just the common distain for ePostage. However, these are quite easy to overcome and it seems that market leverage would be the deciding factor. For our ?Markets for attention? experiments, we were able to try a variety of postage systems? all programmed by a single graduate student between classes. It really is that simple. Souped-up email clients are a popular assignment at many schools of computer science.



    Any new email system will have to integrate with the current system. No problem, mail clients already support multiple protocols and accounts. Secure ePostage really isn?t that difficult. It simply requires user authentification at the server OR client level, a technology which is already quite mature.



    With all that said, I don?t think ePostage will happen any time soon. The hassle of sifting through spam will have to significantly outweigh the hassle of choosing and registering with a filtering/postage service.
  • Reply 26 of 55
    Quote:

    Originally posted by shetline

    It's the people who run AppleInsider who would have to worry. While you're the one who kicks off an automatic notification to Brad, by replying to one of his posts, as far as an ISP's SMTP server is concerned, the folks who run the AppleInsider web server are the customers who are sending that e-mail, and who would be billed for it.



    If you'll scroll up and read my post, you'll see that this is exactly what he and I were talking about.



    Anyhow, almost everything you mentioned in your list can easily be circumvented by spammers. Headers and subject can be forged to look official; the spammer can use a valid account that is never checked (or just checked occasionally to delete everything).



    Attachments... well... I'm not sure where I stand on those. I don't like the idea in general of using e-mail to send files, but sometimes it is unavoidable.



    The one thing that stands out that you mentioned is HTML. Blocking or charging for this would easily cut out the *vast* majority of spammers while leaving most legitimate users okay.



    Still, this arises another question:



    Who collects such a tax? To whom is it returned? e-mail is an international subject. Are we supposed to rely on individual ISPs to handle this? The US federal government? What about spammers overseas?



    There are just too many variables for this to have any positive impact.
  • Reply 27 of 55
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    I don't even get spam once a month. I have a myrealbox account and I have only been slightly cautious about giving my email out and I haven't had to worry about anything. The main problem is email addresses from more then 3 years ago or so that are receiving the most spam and people who were careless and before companies saw the problem of them selling emails. Now those people are paying the price (my family email one of them), but for the most part a little bit of caution and a new email address has done the trick for me.



    I don't know how to tell how hold my email account is but it's I'd think slightly over a year, maybe a year and a half.
  • Reply 28 of 55
    I guess Bill Gates is tired of getting all those "penis enlargment" emails, he subconsciously signs up for all those "sick ****" mailing lists....LOL
  • Reply 29 of 55
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by dfiler

    I think it's a waste of time to rail against a proposal for a mandatory $.01 email fee. Obviously, no fee based email system will ever be mandatory.



    What's obvious about this? Getting international cooperation is a big hurdle, yes, but there's nothing stopping a law from being passed requiring ISPs to bill their high-usage customers on a per-message basis.



    To prevent the natural knee-jerk "Don't charge me!" response, I think it's very important to stress that these charges be for high-usage customers only.



    ISPs who do not cooperate by taking appropriate measures could find that way too much of their legitimate e-mail is blocked by the rest of the world, which would put pressure on them to cooperate and implement their own spam-discouraging billing systems. If this kind of cooperation did not ensue, spammers would still lose out because mail from spam-friendly ISPs would be routinely blocked, and therefore have little value.

    Quote:

    Also, focusing specifically on the overly simplistic fee of 1-penny-per-email is a waste of time. Again it's obvious that people will only adopt a system that actually provides a service such as the filtering of spam.



    Again, I see nothing obvious here. What I'm talking about would be zero cost to most e-mail users, only kicking in when customers reach bulk e-mail levels. My scheme would not require users to take any action in order to adopt the system.



    These changes would happen, either by law or by "please don't block my customers' e-mail" pressure, without customers having to do anything. Providing that these changes aren't easily hacked around, customers would benefit without having to do a thing, without having to actively adopt any new system.



    Customers would get even greater benefits by updating their e-mail clients to newer ones that include filtering capabilities keyed to the new system, but this would not be required.

    Quote:

    It seems that detractors normally have a knee-jerk reaction against ePostage.



    At least that much we agree on, although I see very different solutions to the problem.

    Quote:

    Typically, this leads to them arguing against an obviously flawed postage system instead of looking at the ones which they might actually like...



    ...A far more popular postage system is as follows:

    On your secure (spam filtered) email account you can have a list of people from which to receive messages with no postage. These messages will rely on header based public/private key pairs. Messages from ?strangers? will require the sender to pay an amount postage which you yourself have specified...




    While some of this might have merit, I think it's way too complicated and requires way too much change in the way people deal with e-mail.



    Schemes that work mostly within current standard e-mail protocols are best, as are schemes that put most of the burden of change on ISPs rather than on their millions and millions of individual customers. Having e-mail users billing and paying each other for e-mail is getting way too complicated.



    Only if the current e-mail system proves to be too vulnerable to hacking to be saved by small changes should more complex schemes be considered. A system requiring everyone, or even just everyone trying to avoid spam, to use secure e-mail and public certificates and the like is making things too complicated.



    Also, whereas I have proposed a system for dealing with things like automated web server e-mail responses, I don't see how the kind of scheme you propose would play well with such e-mails.



    For example: The folks who run AppleInsider sure as hell aren't going to pay money so I can get an automated e-mail notification that someone replied to a post of mine. The only way I'd ever get such a message would be to modify my e-mail settings for every discussion board I ever join, entering some special key that I have to set up for each discussion board.
  • Reply 30 of 55
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Brad

    ...

    Anyhow, almost everything you mentioned in your list can easily be circumvented by spammers. Headers and subject can be forged to look official; the spammer can use a valid account that is never checked (or just checked occasionally to delete everything).



    ...

    Still, this arises another question:



    Who collects such a tax? To whom is it returned? e-mail is an international subject. Are we supposed to rely on individual ISPs to handle this? The US federal government? What about spammers overseas?




    Heheh... I should have saved the video cassettes of me having this conversation with literally hundreds of people.



    There are very secure ways to authenticate users over the internet. Encryption and key pairs are known domains and are used everyday with trillions of dollars of transactions. Rest assured, it is very easy to set up a system that only transmits email if you are properly authenticated. Sure... it could be cracked, but so could all the financial software on Wall Street.



    As to 'Who collects such a tax?'

    This sentence in itself is interesting. It seems that many people view the possibility of ePostage as something that will be forced upon them. This is an interesting assumption that perhaps says a bit about how people perceive? oh hell, that?s an entirely different subject?



    ePostage would not have to be mandatory or even regulated by the government. The concept of taxation is not directly related to the possibility of fee based email service. The service would be available to those who feel it offers benefits over free email. Just as you might send a message via FedEx, UPS, or a national Postal Service in order to reach a single address. The same could be true for email. A variety of authentification/filtering services could deliver to the same inbox without any confusion. Some would even do it for free.



    ePostage is not evil.
  • Reply 31 of 55
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Brad

    If you'll scroll up and read my post, you'll see that this is exactly what he and I were talking about.



    My apologies if I misread something.

    Quote:

    Anyhow, almost everything you mentioned in your list can easily be circumvented by spammers. Headers and subject can be forged to look official; the spammer can use a valid account that is never checked (or just checked occasionally to delete everything).



    I'm no expert on all of the creative ways that hackers can hack, so I'm sure there are things I could be missing, but I do understand how easily headers can be forged. For what I'm proposing, that shouldn't matter one bit.



    What I'm proposing requires going through your ISP's SMTP server to send e-mail, and that this SMTP server being modified to support extra billing and filtering functions.



    Here are my assumptions and conditions. Please flag anything that doesn't make work or make sense:
    • Very few of us are connected directly to the internet backbone, so I think it's safe to assume that nearly all of us, even spammers, need to have access, direct or indirect, to an ISP to send e-mail to the world at large. Without ISP access, at most you can send "in-house" e-mail within a LAN.

    • ISPs can prevent their customers from using their own private SMTP servers to talk to the rest of the world, forcing customers to go through the ISP's own SMTP server.

    • ISPs don't need e-mail headers to identify from whom traffic, including e-mail traffic, is coming. They can, and almost always do, recognize you by the IP address that they have assigned you. An IP address can be spoofed, but it's much harder to spoof than an e-mail header. I believe such spoofing tends to cause suspicious and detectable network problems. Extra precautions that can be added, which nearly all existing e-mail client software can support, are requiring username/password access to the SMTP server and/or SSL access to the server.

    • Having identified you by your IP address, and possibly by username and password over a secure channel, it?s easy for an SMTP server to access your customer records and increment a counter for each e-mail you send. The ISP will already have a billing relationship with you, so the question of who bills whom for what is fairly obvious: when you exceed your free outgoing e-mail limit for a given billing period, excess e-mail is billed to your account with your ISP.

    • For the charge-free automated e-mail loophole I talked about, it would be up to the SMTP server to examine your e-mail message, headers and content, to determine if it qualifies for a billing exception. Forge your message's headers all you like ? if the SMTP server doesn?t like what it sees, it either bills you for the message or doesn?t send it at all. What the server demands from your e-mail in-and-of-itself will make the message stand out in an easily filterable way, and also make the message a poor vehicle for spam. Unless you can hack the outgoing side of your ISP?s SMTP server, you won?t be able to forge away the required header information that you had to put in the message in the first place.

    • The goal is not to make all spam completely impossible, but to make large bulk mailing incredibly difficult or expensive.

    Quote:

    Attachments... well... I'm not sure where I stand on those. I don't like the idea in general of using e-mail to send files, but sometimes it is unavoidable.



    The one thing that stands out that you mentioned is HTML. Blocking or charging for this would easily cut out the *vast* majority of spammers while leaving most legitimate users okay




    I?m only taking about disallowing attachments, limiting message length, etc. for a special class of ?automated response? e-mail, not for all e-mail.

    Quote:

    Who collects such a tax? To whom is it returned? e-mail is an international subject. Are we supposed to rely on individual ISPs to handle this? The US federal government? What about spammers overseas?



    Who the charge (not a tax) is collected by, namely your ISP, I mentioned above. Ways of coaxing broad adoption of these standards I mentioned in another post.



    [Edit: added a new bullet item]
  • Reply 32 of 55
    crusadercrusader Posts: 1,129member
    I get maybe one spam message a month. Earthlink and Mail together are fabulous at detecting and getting rid of my spam. Spam on my end is not a big issue.



    Spam is a huge issue, however, at the higher levels of the internet. A serious amount of bandwidth is being consumed at the main backbones. At some point, the major network providers will have to put some kind of filtering at the layer 3 network level on the major backbones may have to be implemented. Bandwidth is $$$$.
  • Reply 33 of 55
    a_greera_greer Posts: 4,594member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Stroszek

    1¢/email is not the same as a 37¢ stamp. [/B]



    BIG HUGE DIFFERANCE:

    $0.37 is a good deal for:

    1: postman picks mail up from box

    2: sorters and people to run equipment

    3: drivers (over the road)

    4: pilots (those letters dont get from sea to shining sea by magic)

    5: clerks (some one has to keep those lines slow)

    6: postmen to deliver the stuff.

    and many others that i cant think of



    now email

    1: 3 or 4 sys admins at each end that dont even handle 99% of email

    and what about my isp 39.99 dsl includes 7 addresses UNLIMITED EMAIL



    and what if I OWN THE SERVER AND DOMAIN? do i still have to pay for what i send to a co-worker on the same domain?
  • Reply 34 of 55
    a_greera_greer Posts: 4,594member
    Random thought:

    Why not filter on the SENDERS isp?

    and maby red flag limits to avoid spoofing that would work like this

    if your account sends more than 40 emails in an hour then sending is TEMPERARILY disabled and you are called by your isp, kinda like credit cards, if i use it only to dine out in chicago and suddenly somone trys to buy 3 powerbooks in NYC the bank calls and asks why
  • Reply 35 of 55
    NO F**KING CHARGES! -ahem



    - This is a commercial money-making ploy



    - Spam is not my fault, HOW DARE YOU even suggest I should pay for it.



    - There should be stricter laws against spammers, against those who sell email lists and against incompetent server admins, NOT ME!



    - A good email filter is all an end user needs.
  • Reply 36 of 55
    PS. I have USED UP my Hotmail Blocking function(!), but since syncing my Hotmail account with Mail, only a handful of 50+ junk emails a week get into my inbox.
  • Reply 37 of 55
    I guess it is hotmail people that get the most spam.. I see a message or two in my Junk folder once every week or two but it doesn't really bother me since it is separate from the others and I can just delete it.
  • Reply 38 of 55
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by SonOfSylvanus

    NO F**KING CHARGES! -ahem



    Any reasonable system would allow for plenty of free e-mail, so no need to get your panties in a bunch over something that should only effect those trying to do massive bulk e-mailing.

    Quote:

    This is a commercial money-making ploy



    It could be twisted into one, but it is/can be/should be much more of a deterrent against abuse of the e-mail system.

    Quote:

    Spam is not my fault, HOW DARE YOU even suggest I should pay for it.



    Done sensibly, with reasonable allowances for free e-mail before charges kick in, no one would be suggesting that you pay for anything.

    Quote:

    There should be stricter laws against spammers, against those who sell email lists and against incompetent server admins, NOT ME!



    Such laws can and should be part of a solution, but they may not be sufficient. Done the right way this proposal has merit and won't harm the typical user in the slightest.

    Quote:

    A good email filter is all an end user needs.



    If something isn't done about spam, you'll end up getting billed a whole lot more than 1 cent per e-mail in indirect costs causes by all of the bandwidth chewed up by spam before it even reaches any e-mail filters, and by the time wasted throughout the economy has a whole dealing with spam.



    Spam also has a way of keeping one step ahead of many filters, so simple end-user filters are far from adequate protection.
  • Reply 39 of 55
    Charging 1 cent, for what... I pay already my internet provider, for space to store the little buggers... as for access, I pay there as well...



    To me this looks like a another "TAX or FEE without Representation" scheme...



    And if there was some kind of additional fee imposed upon us, YOU KNOW THE SCAMMERS and SPAMMERS WOULD FIND A WAY OUT OF PAYING IT, (send it in from off shore) so the regular joe or jane would be picking up the tab, again...



    Just a side note, but this kind of gossip came up during the last big election year...
  • Reply 40 of 55
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Mac_ken_Cheez

    Charging 1 cent, for what... I pay already my internet provider, for space to store the little buggers... as for access, I pay there as well...



    Will somebody please, please read the thread first, before shooting off, and consider the fact that in the most likely form of this proposal e-mail would still be completely free?



    Is the fear-driven urge to yell "AAAARRRGGGHHH! DON'T CHARGE ME!!!!!" so overwhelming that it overrides all reason and reading comprehension?
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