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Spam-proofing the mail system

Spam-proofing the mail system

Posted Dec 18, 2003 10:16 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524)
In reply to: Spam-proofing the mail system by sfeam
Parent article: Spam-proofing the mail system

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.


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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.

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