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Spam-proofing the mail system
Spam-proofing the mail system
Posted Dec 18, 2003 5:51 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841)In reply to: Spam-proofing the mail system by freemars
Parent article: Spam-proofing the mail system
Your proposal sounds counterproductive. As you describe it, the spammer only gets charged if I read the spam. The spammer might well be OK with that, but my goal is to never see the spam in the first place. The more successful people become at filtering, the less penalty is applied to the spammer. Surely that is not what you intended.
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Spam-proofing the mail system
Posted Dec 18, 2003 10:16 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]
This is true, on the surface.But the thing is, the requirement alone to attact a dime to every outgoing spam is likely more than enough to make spamming a non-issue.
If you have to attach say $0.10 to every outgoing message, then even if 90% of the spam is never read so you eventually get the money back (I assume there'd be a timeout of some sort), you'd still be paying $0.01 a message.
Sending a million spam-emails at this rate would cost you $10K. Personally, I think this is low. Because the economics of reading spam would completely change. I would, for example, happily read and delete spam if I knew it would gain me, and cost the spammer, $0.10 for each one. Why, with my current load, and assuming I could process one spam a second, I would make around $5 a day, and would be spending less than 10 minutes to do so.
In practice offcourse, the chanse of any spammer paying me, even a single cent, for me to read their message is miniscule.
Spam-proofing the mail system
Posted Dec 19, 2003 1:58 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]
Hear hear. Between my automatic deleters and my morning manual deletion ritual, I determine to be spam and delete about 200 messages a day. The morning ritual takes about two minutes. Programming the automatic deleters, an hour a month. Well worth $20. Of course, most of those spams would not be in my mailbox at all if they had to have $.10 attached. Based on the fact that I never buy anything and never fall for scams, I doubt I'd get more than a few spams a week.
Spam-proofing the mail system
Posted Dec 18, 2003 14:52 UTC (Thu) by freemars (subscriber, #4235) [Link]
The more successful people become at filtering, the less penalty is applied to the spammer. Surely that is not what you intended.
Indeed that's not what I intended. Filtering spam would have the same effect as what I described as blacklisting; accept the payment for the spam but throw away the message unread. It costs them a dime but they have no idea if the message was ever seen by human eyeballs.