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Is metered e-mail a viable anti-spam tactic?

Mar 8, 2004 11:49PM PST

If the US Postal Service delivered mail for free, US mailboxes would surely be filled 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. Many Internet analysts worry, though, that turning e-mail into an economic commodity would undermine its value in democratising communication.

But let's start with the math: At perhaps a penny or less per item, e-mail postage wouldn't significantly dent the pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a day. Not so for spammers who mail millions at a time.

Though postage proposals have been in limited discussion for years _ a team at Microsoft Research has been at it since 2001 _ Gates gave the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

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.

Time is money, and spammers would presumably have to buy many more machines to solve enough puzzles.

The open-source software Hashcash, available since about 1997, takes a similar approach and has been incorporated into other spam-fighting tools including Camram and Spam Assassin. Meanwhile, Goodmail Systems Inc has been in touch with Yahoo! Inc and other e-mail providers about using cash. Goodmail envisions charging bulk mailers a penny a message to bypass spam filters and avoid being incorrectly tossed as junk.

That all sounds good for curbing spam, but what if it kills the e-mail you want as well?

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_605107,00030010.htm

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