Stop spam, pay for email?

Ipood

I propose the idea that email is charged for by the mail service provider by the post an insignificant fee (i.e. £0.001). Proceeds can be used to setup a governing body that provides a database with the following functions.

1. When an account is setup as funded, the send address is registered on the database by the mail provider, if the fund is depleted, then the mail provider strikes the sending address from the database until funds are ammended.
2. When an email is received by a mail service provider, if the user has opted to only receive paid for emails, the service provider checks the senders name against the database and only forwards the mail to the recipient if the sender is valid on the database.

The reason to do this is that I would struggle to send 200 emails a month (£0.20 which could be built into my service provider account), and my company pay several £1000's in spamware and administration to stop spam, but spammer send 10's of 000's of emails at a time to try to get a response. 10,000 emails = £100 and hence an investment that they may not be happy to take.

Now, open to public comment :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:


I apologise for putting an idea as a thread, but this seems as good a place as any.

jaydeeuk1

Wouldn't work. I don't think you understand quite how email, and in particular spam works. Spammers (or at least the professional ones) don't just create a gmail account and off they go. They have their own or hire servers, or find open relay SMTP servers and blast all the emails through that. Block the IP, and they find another.

I can setup a server, and send 500 emails a minute without any 'service provider' using just 10 or so lines of code and an asp/.net page. And how would you charge me if I'm relaying my messages from Russia?

victor2

Ipood wrote: »

When an email is received by a mail service provider, if the user has opted to only receive paid for emails, the service provider checks the senders name against the database and only forwards the mail to the recipient if the sender is valid on the database.

So, it will only work if the whole emailing world signs up to it?
If I want to receive an email from my newly discovered aunt in Australia, I won't get it unless she's signed up to the system also? Unless of course I've signed up to it and said to let all email through, spam included.
There are already anti-spam systems that do that for nothing.
Non starter IMO.

Nilrem

As has been said it wouldn't do a thing unless the whole SMTP/Email system in use everywhere was changed.
Basically you'd need to move everyone in the world over to a new system, including all the legacy installations, all the apps on things like smart phones, every server, every personal computer would need to have updates*.


The industry (hosting, service providers etc) already take quite extensive steps to try and stop spam and other unwanted/illegal activities, up to and including blacklisting hosting companies and refusing to provide them with connections, and at a lower level most ISP's take action on spammers using their services, including things like limiting the number of emails you can send per day, monitoring for excessive email use etc (for example, from memory my hosting company has a limit of something like 500 emails I can send a day via my hosting package).


*Given that IPv6 has now been around for something like a decade, and has much bigger and more immediate advantages to both consumers, ISP's and companies, than a change in the email system, and yet is as rare as rocking horse poop at consumer levels (and rare as hens teeth at ISP level), it's not going to happen.

gb12345

As jaydee says, you don't understand how spammers operate, so your suggestion is a non-starter.

But even if we did assume that by some miracle every ISP and email provider in the world decided to sign up for your wonderful new system do you really think that spammers (who illegally obtain the email addresses that they spam) are going to pay. Nope, what they will do is go to the person who provided them with the email addresses and pay them for stolen credit card/bank/paypal accounts and use them to pay to send their emails. Might cost them a bit more, but they will just target spam subject that increase their income to cover the additional costs.

securityguy

Ipood wrote: »

I propose the idea that email is charged for by the mail service provider by the post an insignificant fee (i.e. £0.001).

Your post advocates a

(X) technical (X) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
(X) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X)Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

securityguy

Nilrem wrote: »

*Given that IPv6 has now been around for something like a decade, and has much bigger and more immediate advantages to both consumers, ISP's and companies, than a change in the email system, and yet is as rare as rocking horse poop at consumer levels (and rare as hens teeth at ISP level), it's not going to happen.

Rather more than a decade: RFC1883 dates back to December 1995. Although of course it doesn't offer _existing_ consumers, ISPs and companies much.

John_Gray

I think we should have a forum about spam... :A

Toxteth_OGrady

John_Gray wrote: »

I think we should have a forum about spam... :A

:spam:

:rotfl: