Stamps for e-mail

[ch0l0man]

Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail

Paying for e-mail seen as anti-spam tactic
Friday, March 5, 2004 Posted: 11:25 AM EST (1625 GMT)

NEW YORK (AP) -- 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.

article

[lil_freak]

Just my opinion: "Bill Gates Go To HELL".

I'd rather keep the spam than have to pay for my e-mail.

[jesse]

yeah, because spending money on postage prevents junk mail totally... oh, wait.

[bascule]

Seems to me that Microsoft has three very tired ideas about how to stop spam, which for some reason get media attention every few months:

1. "Postage"
2. Computational penalty for sending e-mail
3. Sender validation

The funny thing is that whenever one of these gains attention, the same old responses to why these are all horrible ideas come up:

1 & 2 are both completely impractical for mailing lists. With a "half cent" stamp for e-mail, each message sent to a 100,000 recipient mailing list costs $500. With a 10 second computation required to send a message to a receiver, it would take over 11 days to send a single message to a mailing list. With the third, the MTA of the sender's address would be hammered by tens of thousands of connections coming from remote MTAs validating that the sender's address is valid.

Furthermore, the third is impractical in the SMTP mail architecture for a number of reasons. Namely, where does sender validation take place? At each relay in the entire mail system? The only sensible place to handle this is at the MTA which receives the message from the sender initially, preferably by checking a list of valid e-mail addresses associated with a given user account being utilized by SMTP auth over SSL. Making a large enterprise or university edge mail relay connect to each MX associated with the sender's domain of every mail message passing through the system is totally impractical... these systems are often processing thousands of messages every minute. Finally, how is this supposed to stop spam? It would still need to be backwards compatible with MTAs that don't support this feature. It could in theory prevent spammers from using From addresses with a domain whose MTA does support this feature, but all a spammer need do to get their message through is list a bogus From address, or use a domain of an MTA that's known not to support this feature.

There are real, proven, effective solutions to spam: greylisting, automagic Bayesian filtering, and as a less effective solution, more error-prone solution, blacklists.

I really hate how Microsoft keeps getting attention in this matter. They don't have good ideas, keep regurgitating the same tired old formulas, and people continue to shoot them down for the reasons I've already stated, and more. It's really sad that ideas like IM2000 don't get more publicity, when they solve the real problem of spam: the financial cost to operators of large (i.e. enterprise or university) mail servers.

[bascule]

This is an interesting picture:


"Dude, this is a wicked joint. It's messing with my mind. DUDE, I just figured out how to get rid of spam... stamps for e-mail! I have the best Ideas while I'm high..."

[astcell]

Microsoft "saved" us from viruses in Outlook by disabling the attachments. I guess to save uis from spam they can just take Outlook out of Office completely!

[javajedi]

Does Anyone Else...

I recall an OLD joke about secretaries who put postage stamps on their monitor each time they had to send an email. Anyone else here wonder if Bill G. ever got the fact that this was just a joke? :)

[leman_russ]

email stamps

Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail

Paying for e-mail seen as anti-spam tactic
Friday, March 5, 2004 Posted: 11:25 AM EST (1625 GMT)

NEW YORK (AP) -- 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.

article

Bill Gates should go to hell, that's a retarded idea. I'd rather have spam than pay for email.

[noid]

Especialy since paying for your mail wont guarantee no spam any more than putting stamps on regular mail protects your mailbox from junk mail.


P.S. leman_russ, cool handle.

[Webster]

Well, according to www.billgatesisdead.com he died in april 1999, haha. Anyways Bill Gates blows ass, thats outrageous and pointless.

[Qu|rk]

The concept of e-mail stamps... thrown out by the corporation with the most software holes and vulnerabilities in the industry... it may be a good idea, as long as the same coders dont touch the stamp servers....if they ever found it feasible, and actually did it with the servers being microshaft-related, you might as well not buy them... I would bet the stamp servers in question would be full of holes, and compromised frequently by spammers, or would give spammers just another challenge of forging stamps.

Solution: SpamAssassin, and it runs on any real OS

Qu|rk-

[Gadsden]

//begin rant
Fuck Gates, and fuck his ideas. Admins with half a clue could get rid of 90% of the spam out there if they would get off their collective asses and do something about it. It is not THAT hard to do, it just takes a bit of knowhow and effort. Christ, if a task takes more than 10 seconds thought, many of the admins I have seen will shy away from it.. especially if they can't click a pretty icon to fix it. With a ton of the open relays spewing out spam being exchange 5.5 boxes that relay by default, MS should be paying US when we get spam..
//end rant

[astcell]

Who invented relaying anyway!

[FAWCR]

//begin rant
Fuck Gates, and fuck his ideas. Admins with half a clue could get rid of 90% of the spam out there if they would get off their collective asses and do something about it. It is not THAT hard to do, it just takes a bit of knowhow and effort. Christ, if a task takes more than 10 seconds thought, many of the admins I have seen will shy away from it.. especially if they can't click a pretty icon to fix it. With a ton of the open relays spewing out spam being exchange 5.5 boxes that relay by default, MS should be paying US when we get spam..
//end rant

Your not upset because they shafted you on your M$ posters are you?

[Gadsden]

Your not upset because they shafted you on your M$ posters are you?

Me?! Bitter or cranky?!? BA!
Ok.. maybe just a lot. :D

Actually, the rant was directed at lazy/clueless admins as much as microsoft.