Must We Pay For Email?
from the this-again? dept
One of the popular suggestions for stopping spam is to start charging for every email sent. The latest proponent of this plan are the folks at Forrester Research. They make the same mistakes most people do in proposing such a solution – suggesting that the benefits will far outweigh the costs. They suggest that most firms will actually save money because they won’t have to pay for spam filters any more. They also suggest that email will become more useful – since emails won’t get ignored and/or lost so much. However, there are also a ton of unintended consequences that they ignore. First, revamping the entire infrastructure of email for the sake of tracking and charging will be incredibly expensive. Then, maintaining that infrastructure will raise all sorts of other issues. They will need to track usage, charges, do the billing, and make sure people pay. These are not inexpensive things. It also acts to discourage use. Putting any sort of “per-use” tax will discourage legitimate uses of email just as much as the bad uses of email. Mailing lists would become nearly impossible to maintain, and because email would need to be tracked to specific people, anonymous email would become impossible. The basic idea of charging to stamp out spammers may sound nice, but there are unintended consequences that suggest it wouldn’t be a very useful solution, while also placing the cost burden on all of the legitimate users of email.
Comments on “Must We Pay For Email?”
Pay for Email
I think a pay for email solution is the right one.
The way I would structure it would be to charge no fee for the first 10 emails per day. After the first 20 emails, the cost would be $0.01 per email for the next 20, $0.2 for the next 20, and so on doubling the costs at every additional 20
emails.
Yes, you could send about 70 emails for about
$1.20, pretty cheap, but 1000 emails would cost about $250, 2000 would cost $1000.
A scheme list this would definitely put back the costs into spam.
Unfortunately, you and I might get charge for our sending of emails, but someone with their own servers could inject emails for free with nothing to prevent that unless you charge to receive emails and make the sender buy a stamp from you isp before it would receive the email into your account. This would make every ISP a post office…
Re: Pay for Email
That would destroy any legitimate mailing list as well, which seems like an awful lot of collateral damage.
No Subject Given
The only reason why a solution hasn’t already been implemented is that any reasonable solutions require everyone to upgrade to a new system.
This is no different. So if you are going to have to upgrade then why not use a system that everyone (except the spammers of course) is happy with, rather than one that one company (who makes all the money) is happy with.
I guess it wouldn’t just be one company, they are suggesting that ISPs would get most of the money. But it sounds to me that some company would end up like visa… sitting back and scoping off the top. And in this case they wouldn’t even need to provide any infrastructure like visa does.
excuse the lack of proper spacing, for some reason when I post from solaris netscape it doesn’t seem to work. since I added this disclaimer it probably will this time 🙂
No Subject Given
The part that will suck about charging for email is mailing lists. Sure I only send a few mailing messages a day, but what about legitimate mailing lists?
I prefer to think of spam as a protocol violation. The TrustMark folks do a good job of making it work like that. 😉
Paying for a per email fee is a solution in search
Charging a per email fee, in hard currency, is a solution in search of a problem. Who would get the money? How would you make sure that each sender paid his/her fair share? What about legitimate mailing lists? Anonymous email? Too much pain and loss for too little gain.
The solution I have always favored is to bring back envelopes, digital envelopes. I’ve written about this on Slashdot and other places in the past, but I’ll recap.
Everyone in the world that has an email address gets a public/private key pair. For your average Jane it doesn’t have to be terribly secure, you aren’t trying to keep the CIA from reading your email just wrap it up in an electronic envelope. For those of us that want to keep out the CIA/NSA/MI5 we can have more than one key (;). By default everyone’s email client is set up to accept encrypted email and reject plain text. You can choose to accept plain text if you want, some people like bulk mail.
Now you have divided email into at least four piles, first-class certified (encrypted-signed), first-class (encrypted-unsigned), postcards (unencrypted-signed), and bulk-rate (unencrypted-unsigned). If a spammer wants to rate any higher than post-card he will have to encrypt his spam with the keys of everyone he wants to spam. He now has to spend an increasing amount of resources to send out an increasing amount of spam as the same message needs to be encrypted with the key of each recipient. Since only valid email addresses have keys, dictionary based spams become a thing of the past (or at least get sent out at the bulk-rate level).
Set your client at the level you want. Certified FC only, First class only, etc. Since the software to create/manage keys pairs are included in every email client application, there is no need for any central authority to manage anything. Legit mailing lists are still possible, and as an added benefit, it will make the job of would be snoops all the more difficult.
Just my $0.02. (Canadian, before taxes)
someone247356@yahoo.com
Pay for email
I think a charge on emails is the easiest and most palatable solution to stop spam.
You should see what they are considering as the alternatives over here (in AUS)!
For example, any computer from which it is suspected that an unsolicited email has been sent will be subject to search and seisure (and the household which houses it) without any court order or permission of the owners.
A 1 cent charge on outgoing emails is no problem to legitimate senders, especially if that cent gets PAID TO THE RECEIVER of the email.
Yes, you would have to set up tracking and charging software, but most people who send email do so using a service provider who could add the cent to their account and most people who receive email do so using a service provider who could subtract the cent from their account.
All you need is for everyone in-between to know who they are talking to (and don’t they?) – you just don’t forward an email unless the source has a trustworthy pay record.
Yes, it would stop anonymous emails – at least you couldn’t be anonymous to your own service provider, but I wouldn’t mind that – I don’t try to misrepresent myself or hide.
On the other-hand, I would really like the feeling that everyone of those stupid adds to get free cable or a bigger penis was paying my internet account.