h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I heard something about this quite some time ago, and it was raised again on the radio a couple of days ago, and I've not yet decided if its a good idea, or one that will change the way in which we communicate by E-mail.

The basic premise seems to be, that if a charge was made per E-mail we send, say 1 pence/1 cent etc., then it would dramatically reduce the numbers of junk, or spam E-mails we recieve.
In theory, that sounds like a hypothesis that would work, I can't see many spammers wanting to pay what would amount to a lot of money, in sending out hundreds and thousands of junk E-mails.

But how would this effect our own personal use of E-mails to friends, and how would it effect E-mails we might want to recieve?
For example, I get an E-mail about once a week from a supermarket grocery online shopping site, telling me of new offers they have etc., would they then want to charge me, as the end user for sending out such 'informational' E-mails, that I appreciate recieving?
What would happen, again as an example, to say, the E-mails regarding moderation on H2G2, would it be sensible for the BBC, to charge the end user for recieving such an E-mail?

Wat u all think?

See my personal space for the reason that we at Hong Kong Players would be very much against paying for every outgoing email.

Oh, yeh, over 800 people in the mailing list, would work out quite expensive, especially if your sending out mail to them all frequently.... I can't figure out how many mails I send a week, but some days I must send way over ten

i don't like the idea of having to pay with money for sending an email. Considering i don't personally have an income of my own.

I do kind of agree with the concept of making some one pay with processor time on there computer.

Or they could just use a sercure protocal and signatures.

I think Wand'rin Star was referring to the 560,000 mails that one recipient of her mailing list accidentally sent to himself.

Supermarkets and such like spend a lot on advertising at the moment, so they would not mind spending a cent on sending you details of their latest offers. What the one cent charge would prevent is the companies which send an e-mail to every known e-mail address, without any reference to where in the world the recipient is.

I'd certainly be in favour of the 1 cent charge, but I don't think there is any way in which it can now be enforced.

Nice idea,
The mass-mailing viruses would not do as much damage
It could be setup like pay-as-you -go phones, or similar.

So you receive a virus that then sends an email to everyone in your address book. You have to *pay* for those emails too!

or as they are currently creating, make a secure protocal that dosn't have the same loopholes that allow untraceable spam.

hello Reddyfreddy


Paying for email may make a lot of cents
February 4, 2004

The days of sending emails for free may be numbered. The owners of the two largest email systems in the world, Microsoft and Yahoo, are considering ways of imposing a "postage" fee for emails.

Internet experts have long suggested that the rising tide of junk email, or spam, would turn into a trickle if senders had to pay even as little as one cent for each message.

And Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, has told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that spam would not be a problem in two years, partly because of systems that would require people to pay to send email.

By making emailers buy electronic "stamps" - in fact, encrypted code numbers - the illegal spammers could be forced to identify themselves, or give up.

A one cent charge might be minor for most emailers, but it could destroy spamming businesses that send a million offers in the hope 10 people will respond.

Mr Gates even suggested a system that would allow users to waive charges for friends and relatives.

Yahoo is quietly evaluating an email postage plan being developed by Goodmail, a Silicon Valley start-up company. It proposes that only high-volume mailers pay postage at first - a cent per email.

The money would go to the email recipient's internet access provider. But the company suggests that the internet providers share the payments with their users, either through rebates or by lowering monthly fees. Under this system, a mass emailer would sign up with Goodmail, buying a block of stamps - encrypted code numbers that it would insert in the header of each email message.

If the internet provider of the recipient participates in the system, it decrypts the stamp and submits it to Goodmail. Only then is the sender's account charged a cent and the receiving service provider paid the money, minus a service fee for Goodmail.

Senders would not pay for stamps that were not used, but they would pay whether or not an email recipient read the message.

However, some experts fear big spammers will be happy to pay the postage. "It is the spammers who are the ones with the big pockets," says Charles Stiles, manager of the postmaster department at America Online, who worries such a system might restrict the wrong mail.

AOL is taking a different approach and is testing a system under development by the Internet Research Task Force.

The system, called the Sender Permitted From, or SPF, creates a way for the owner of an internet domain, such as aol.com, to specify which computers are authorised to send email with aol.com return addresses.

That allows a recipient's email system to determine whether a message being represented as coming from someone at aol.com really is from that address. Most spam being sent now uses forged return addresses.

Microsoft has been floating a similar proposal, labeled "caller ID", that could be expanded in the future to accommodate more sophisticated anti-spam approaches including internet postage systems.

Discussions are under way among the backers of SPF, Microsoft and others involved in email to reach a compromise sender notification system.

All these proposals can run into problems because there are legitimate cases when mail sent by one domain claims to be from another. For example, online greeting-card services will send messages with the return address of the person sending the card, even though the message does not go through the sender's email account.

People taking part in the discussion say that companies such as greeting-card services may need to change their e-mail software to comply with the new standards.

"Every proposed scheme will break parts of the way email works today," said Hans Peter Brondmo, a senior vice-president of Digital Impact who has represented big emailers in the spam technology negotiations.

The challenge, he said, is to find a system that will require as little retrofitting as possible to email systems

Good in that spam would probably drop. Bad in that prices never go down, once you have to pay for email it will go on getting more expensive. Then you could add service charges - scanning for viruses, making it urgent - soon it would be as expensive as snail mail. It would make ISP's want more spam, as they would get paid for it. Of course that does not even include spammers best friends - the crackers. Crack the stamp code and send for free, and as it would be 'signed' as paid you will definately get it. Sod paying for it and get a decent antispam tool. Until later....
BCNU - Crescent

Since my dial-up is not free I, like many others, already pay for my email. In fact I pay by size of email since a large email takes longer to upload / download.
In fact I already pay to both send and receive my email.
Spammers will always send bulk email. For a start there is bound to be some form of bulk discount for the genuine mail shots from people like banks and supermarkets. Spammers will no doubt use that. Secondly this concept does nothing to prevent relaying and hijacking.

I can see it as sensible if you want a webmail account which is currently free and often used by spammers.

But the only things that will stop spammers sending junk to my mail box is if all the inept sysadmins/companies out there close their open relays and patch their systems up to the latest fixes. That and all the ISPs that allow spammers to operate from within their netblock are stopped or repeatedly battered with a clue-by-four.

The solution to spam that I was toying with until my ISP installed some rather good spam filtering software at their end (reducing my spam load from about 500 a day to about 10 a day, of which I typically see about 2 because of the spam filters at my end), was to have a list of email addresses (for myself) and a list of allowed senders for each address. So, all my friends who I could give my email address to personally would get dogster.personal@mydomain, I'd sign up to h2g2 with dogster.h2g2@mydomain, and so forth. Only people who I knew I'd given my email address to personally would be able to send mail to dogster.personal, and only emails coming from H2G2 would be accepted at the dogster.h2g2 account, and so forth. This way, even if an unscrupulous company passes my email address on to another company, their emails will be automatically blocked. You could still have a public email address (e.g. on your webpage), but rather than putting dogster.public@mydomain on your webpage, you'd include an image with the text, distorted enough that a web spider wouldn't be able to pick it out, but any human reading it would be able to do so. I think this method would work very well, and would allow you to trace which companies were passing on your email address. It does rely on you having your own domain though, which most people don't.

The solution to spam is quite simple - as it is with virus bandits. Instead of the big players giving them a job you stick them in jail. I have an idea it might work.

how about you don't tell anyone your email address.

oh that reminds me CHAIN EMAILS ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

why do people have to do them, and why do they have to stick your name and millions of others onto a list in an email that a spammer can look at and get an instant list of people taht are likely to be active accounts.