Mar 08
A stamp for sending an e-mail?
2004 at 02.56 am posted by Veerle Pieters
The theory is that you need to buy a stamp at a post office before you can send someone an e-mail. According to Bill Gates (in a CNN interview) this will be THE solution to fight spam. His reasoning is that you get spam because e-mail is now a free medium. To me it sounds like a typical Bill Gates idea, remember he also once said that the Internet will fail and look at where we are now.
You just have to look at your snail mail box, it is also filled with all kinds of publicity and it’s not free, it even costs money to design, print and send. So I seriously doubt if this is the solution to fight spam. Maybe you have to read between the lines here and it’s another way for Microsoft to make money because most likely they will be the ones who will act as a post office. Even if this is the solution it will be very hard to implement such a service worldwide and we all know if every country has to do it separately what a fiasco that will be. I think the answer is technology to better verify e-mail senders and filters as in Apple Mail that work pretty well in filtering out spam messages.
Do you see this stamp proposal as the solution to spam?
7served
1
he’s a little late with his plan! ( as always ) If he had a chance to turn back the times, he would believe me! ( and all postal services worldwide would belong to his company and we would be paying for the air we breath ) and after he did that, he would introduce the Internet Electronic mail ( what a coincidence ) with an ‘electronic’ stamp. ( no timestamp because that would trip his mind )
This guy just has such brilliant & innovative ideas ( especially for his e-wallet ! ) they should honour him with a Nobel price!
2
“Details came last week as part of Microsoft’s anti-spam strategy. Instead of paying a penny, the sender would “buy” postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender’s good faith.”
He didn’t ask for money. He asked for computing time. This is an engineering response to spam, not a marketing response. It’s still not a good idea, though.
3
@ Brian W: Yes, I know but what do you think will happen when this postage is a Microsoft invention? They won’t give it away for free to the community as open source. Something like that is not part of the Microsoft culture.
4
Well, if it is money they want, you are right, that will not solve the problem. Almost all the mail we get at our apartment is “junk mail” (spam!).
This is the kind of response that would hurt normal users more than the spamers. Imagine grandma sitting there not quite understanding why she can’t send email and having to go to microsoft.com/buy/more/stamps.asp.
Think of large corporations that use interoffice email all day long to send things around. If they are using an internet server, are they going to have to stop and take the time to set up and migrate to an interoffice email system to avoid the huge costs of this per email price?
Finally, on the idea of forcing people to solve a bit of code math to send their email. I guess that could work - except, who decides what the piece is. MS? Oh, I can see them giving away the algorithims for that for real cheap - pft.
I am sure a solution will present itself from some innovative individual/group. And until then, it’s really not that big a deal for me since I whitelist my email anyway.
(Whitelist >> unless you are in my address book, you go right to the trash, which i then sort through once every few days.)
5
I won’t pay a single Euro for sending my email! I pay each month my fee for my broadband connection! That is more than enough. I think a possible solution is something like Apple does in their ‘Mail’ app. Create filters to avoid spam. It does work most of the time! I also think providers have sort of responsability for this problem. They should at least try to avoid spam on their servers. I know this all might be wishful thinking but like I said. I won’t visit a MS server to pay for sending my emails.
6
working with a ‘coded stamp’ or whatever math-thing ! It makes me laugh out loud, since when is MS a trusted partner working with reliable software! millions of users work on their systems and zillions of pâtches are downloaded daily to secure their systems! A mathematical stamp won’t last a single day ! the biggest issue will still be :the price! A MS appl. for free...yeah right like in free beer!
7
Believe it or not, but right now I have about one spam Mail every few days in my mail. People who get a lot of spam, get it often because they hand out their e-mail address to anyone without thinking twice.
I’ve been starting to create email aliases on my webserver for many purposes and once I start getting spam on one of them
a) I most of the time know whom I gave that particular alias, so I know who the culprit is sending me spam/selling my mail address
b) I can immediately delete the alias and stop getting spam
c) I will send the culprit a very unfriendly email, asking them whether their really so keen to get sued