If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit card offers, sweepstakes entries and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying ``stamps'' for e-mail
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Stravo wrote:And I just BET Micrososft has developed software to provide these stamps in anticipation of this possibility.
Of course —buggy, defective software full of backdoors which will crash your browser or your whole computer; written and executed by the crack Microsoft Incompetence Squad and eventually requiring half a dozen patches. Purchasable from Microsoft, naturally.
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I don't like the idea of paying... e-mail would not be what it is today without having been free to start with. Even solving a puzzle in order to send would take too long, and be too much of a nusiance.
I foresee Gates starting something like this, but in face of overwhelming public opposition, withdrawing it... like New Coke.
Of course, the idea that it would cut down on spam is probably right-- and would be their main marketing point... I do have to agree that spam is a big enough problem that plenty of people would pick it up, if only to get away from spam.
I already pay for E-mail thank you very much. You have to pay your fucking ISP for e-mail. Paying per mail sent is fucking absurd.
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They can't justify paying for it, the email servers are maintained as part of your ISP's monthy cost or your eyeballs incase you use an online email service,
If you want to charge for it, you have to demostrait a reason to charge for it, it falls under the old fraud and protection acts saying you can't charge for things you don't do nor acutaly provided such as protection from lawyers and Voodoo Witch Doctors, curtisy of Jiffylube for only $9.99 more on your next oil change!
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One wonders, what would come of free e-mail providers like Yahoo and Hotmail? Would they be shut down or allowed to continue operation as pay services? Or just allowed to go on, with the knowledge that they would be big fat targets for spammers?
if they were allowed to continue running for free while other services get charged it would do nothing but upset every customer paying for their emails.
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And how, exactly, would they plan on implementing and enforcing this? Since there are a boatload of e-mail providers out there...
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This is the price of war,
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The war continues on..." - Angela & Jeff van Dyck, We Are All One (Medieval 2: Total War)
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Paying for e-mail to stop spam would work in the same way burning your house to the ground would keep it from being infested by termites. There's probably some more effective and popular way to stop spam, even if it doesn't stop as much spam.
Straight up email stamps would be stupid and counterproductive. What at least sounds interesting is a sender pays upon refusal fee. Basically if you send an email there is a charge if and only if the recipient refuses delivery, further one could imagine some type of cap, say 500 free refusals per person per year.
The only people who really need to be charged have to send out huge numbers of emails to net the handful of morons who will follow the spam; so a system which only charges THEM would not necessarily be bad. All told I'm reserving judgement until I see the concept fleshed out a bit more and actual proposals being dissected by the general public and experts.
Microsoft's proposal is not making you pay money for e-mail use. Their proposal is to have the SMTP server require that the sending machine run a short logic puzzle or decrypt every time an email is sent. Thus, spammers would be forced to spend money on purchasing more machines or send out less spam -- while normal users would not be adversely affected.
Microsoft and Yahoo are also working (seperately) to create some sort of e-mail "Caller ID" method to thwart e-mail spoofing. Sendmail is slated to support both mechanisms (Yahoo's Domain Key and Microsoft's Caller ID for E-Mail).
tharkûn wrote:Straight up email stamps would be stupid and counterproductive. What at least sounds interesting is a sender pays upon refusal fee. Basically if you send an email there is a charge if and only if the recipient refuses delivery, further one could imagine some type of cap, say 500 free refusals per person per year.
That proposal has been around for some years but nothing has ever been done about it. Same with varients on cryptographic header signing -- many proposals (some quite old) but little on the way of implementation.
Gates can masturbate to the thought all he wants, but it isn't going to happen.
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phongn wrote:I see that people here have as yet not read the article.
No shit.
After all its something by "Microsoft" with the word "pay" in the title
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Indeed. This is one of those times where I actually support Microsoft's initiative. It's a proposal for the benefit of everyone, and from what I understand, it's not bound to their technology in any way.
Damien Sorresso
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- The Onion
Durandal wrote:Indeed. This is one of those times where I actually support Microsoft's initiative. It's a proposal for the benefit of everyone, and from what I understand, it's not bound to their technology in any way.
How is paying for sending email to my benefit?
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-revprez, with yet another brilliant rebuttal.
Durandal wrote:Indeed. This is one of those times where I actually support Microsoft's initiative. It's a proposal for the benefit of everyone, and from what I understand, it's not bound to their technology in any way.
How is paying for sending email to my benefit?
YOU'RE NOT FUCKING LISTENING. Read the God damn thread.
Damien Sorresso
"Ever see what them computa bitchez do to numbas? It ain't natural. Numbas ain't supposed to be code, they supposed to quantify shit."
- The Onion
Durandal wrote:Indeed. This is one of those times where I actually support Microsoft's initiative. It's a proposal for the benefit of everyone, and from what I understand, it's not bound to their technology in any way.
Well, I'm not so sure if it considering Moore's Law -- what may take ten seconds now will be computationally trivial in, say, one year, and just scaling up the complexity will be unfair to the average Joe with a P2/500. Also, there is the danger that the code could be offloaded onto a DSP. Yeah, it's more expensive (virtual attrition woo!) but I'm not so if it'll work well.
I'd rather have Yahoo's cryptographic signing in the header since that'll stop spoofing quite handily ... and perhaps a "pay if refused" system.
