Spam-proofing the mail system

Posted Dec 19, 2003 2:00 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

With a decent micropayment system (as postulated), it would be easy to charge minuscule subscription fees for mailing lists, which would cover the occasional non-refund and the transaction fees.

Posted Dec 19, 2003 4:50 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

Who would fund mailing lists?

In a micropayment email system, the recipient sets the amount of the micropayment, which can vary depending on the sender. Most people would whitelist their friends and charge nothing. Presumably they would do this for mailing lists as well, and if the mailing list attempted to deliver to a recipient demanding a payment, would simply drop that recipient from the list.

That leaves open the possibility of a spammer masquerading as a list server, but other anti-spam techniques such as SPF easily thwart such misrepesentation.

It also would be possible to set the amount fairly high, but refund it in the case of unsolicited but non-spam email. For instance, I'd probably set my software to charge at least $0.25, and perhaps as much as $1, for unsolicited email from non-whitelisted senders. But for non-spam email, for instance people inquiring about free software I've written, I would refund it.

Probably a fee as low as a penny would discourage a lot of spam, but having the fee higher would serve to also discourage email from students that want me to do their EE or CS homework for them. (I get such email routinely as the result of having a web page about PIC microcontrollers, despite the web page clearly stating that I don't have time to offer free help.)

Posted Dec 19, 2003 13:46 UTC (Fri) by freemars (subscriber, #4235) [Link]

Who would fund mailing lists? I'm sure you couldn't depend on every user subscribed to a list to return the funds (no to mention the list admin is out those funds until they are returned? This would be a huge problem for large mailing lists.

Mailing lists would depend on whitelists. (This means that any new software supporting micropayments must support whitelists also. Because the whitelist would be stored at the ISP both the userland mail-reading software and the ISP SMTP software would have to support whitelists.)

Mailing lists could operate much like current "double opt-in" lists do today... when you subscribe the list sends a 'welcome' email which asks you to whitelist the mailing list address. When you do (sending a rebate to the list) the software notices and adds you to the list. To remove yourself from a list, simply remove it from your whitelist. When the list software gets a request for a micropayment (not whitelisted) it declines to pay and removes the recipient from the list of subscribers.

Who would manage the micropayments? Would we all get PayPal (shudder) accounts? What prevents micropayments from being stolen by ISPs or someone hijacking accounts?

You've found the potential showstoppers. Ideally, there would be a few banks in the business so there would be some pressure on them to hold rates down. It will be up to individual ISPs to decide if they will accept payments from Fred's Bank (where Fred's Bank might be located in some unsavory nation). I would expect ISPs would quickly settle on accepting payments only from member banks of some International Collaboration of Cooperative Micropayment Banks, all of which agree to the following standards:
**** All payments are made in (what, Euros? Something stable)
**** All payments may be converted to [list of currencies] with a conversion rate set by [someone's daily conversoin rate index]
**** All payments can be redeemed at full face value (the sender pays the bank's mark-up, whatever it is)
**** All member banks will honor payments from any member bank (the cost of this service is built into the sender's mark-up)
**** All member banks use a standard set of protocols when clearing payments
**** ???

I'm hoping a few companies -- probably current-day banks -- would step up and offer such a micropayment system. If all email were to convert to a micropayment system there would be enough use to justify setting up the kind of heavily automated system that would be needed to be affordable.

Spammers will no doubt try to hijack computers which have access to email 'stamps'. Cautious people will not store large numbers of 'stamps' on their computers. Prediction: someone will decide it's a really cool idea to keep the user's credit card information in the computer so the software can automatically buy extra email 'stamps' from the International Bank of Microsoft as needed -- some people will get burned.

"Bad" ISPs stealing people's micropayments ... you ask tough questions ... perhaps the legislation protecting ISPs from anti-trust lawsuits should only apply to those which pass on 100% of the micropayments to their customers. "Bad" ISPs could also mess with customer whitelists, but I don't see what they would gain from doing that.