Cured Spam

Bill Gates foresees a virtually spam-free world in 2006. "Two years from now, spam will be solved," he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Microsoft (along with many other companies) is working on several approaches, including challenge-and-response techniques and computational barriers that would be prohibitive for mass e-mailers. Gates thinks the most promising solution is a kind of a postage you could charge to accept messages from senders who are not on your white list.

I'm not sure exactly how that would work--in particular, how the payments would be processed and transferred--and I don't know how plausible Gates' prediction is. But it would be instructive to knee-jerk regulators if technology could solve the spam problem that quickly.

Already anti-spam software has improved my personal e-mail situation a great deal, but it still takes time to download all those messages prior to sorting (especially if I'm using dial-up), and the network capacity problem can't be addressed with filters on the final recipient's end. It's pretty clear the key to cutting down on total spam traffic is raising the cost of mass mailings; the question is how and how soon.

Comments

[GoonFood]

Any challenge-response or pay-per-mail system runs into a few problems...

1) Just send email through unsecured relays (or relays which always respond that an email sender is valid) -- which is the current problem
2) Send through servers that don't handle any pay-per-mail charging information, or simply refuse to charge for mails

I'm sure there are a plethora of other ways to get around those schemes, which basically puts us right back square one in the war against spam. And neither proposal would hold much water unless it was regulated, world-wide, that you had to abide by pay-per-mail systems or some other scheme. I for one do not want to see any regulations clamping down on the net.

[Dan]

Send through servers that don't handle any pay-per-mail charging information, or simply refuse to charge for mails

I imagine that Microsoft's mail clients will have a toggle switch to not download unauthorized email at all. So the effect of using a non-charging server to send mail would be that nobody with that switch turned on could get the mail.

If the technology isn't widely adopted, that would be a problem; most mail would bounce. But if Microsoft, Apple, and the major ISPs adopt the technology -- and I'd expect them to, since they'd LOVE to be able to bill spammers -- the overwhelming majority of legitimate email sent to and from people in the United States would be covered.

[Steve]

The best/only solution I've seen to spam (i.e. blocking it before you receive it) is SPF records: http://spf.pobox.com/

[PapayaSF]

I have an anti-spam idea that could work by cutting down on the responses to spam. Best of all, it requires no new laws or technology.

I want to see an ad campaign called "Spammers are Scammers." The gist: That pill to enlarge a body part? A scam. Those cheap prescription drugs? Diluted, fake, or actually poison. That cheap mortgage? You'll do better elsewhere. Insurance? How are you going to collect from someone who hides behind a fake email address? Oh, and once these crooks get your credit card number, they'll likely steal that, too. The ads could show some sorry-ass characters bemoaning the ways they got ripped off.

The basic idea is to show that all spammers are crooks, and all their customers are gullible fools. What are spammers going to do in response, identify themselves publicly and produce evidence that their penis-enlarging pills really work?

The ads could be made very cheaply (Final Cut Pro, etc.) with volunteer labor (think of all the pro ad people who hate spam). If open source methods can produce a computer operating system, they should be able to create a basic ad campaign. Then it's just a matter of convincing TV/radio/print outlets to run them as public service ads.

[J]

'I want to see an ad campaign called "Spammers are Scammers."'

I'm a little skeptical that this would do much, because the cost of sending spam (as I understand it) is so small that even if the number of responses is cut by half (or some other significant amount) it would still be worth their while. I imagine it only takes a very few respondents to make spam economical, and there is obviously no shortage of people willing to do stupid things when they should know better (lotteries, psychics, Keanu Reeves movies, etc.)

[Equality 7-2521]

Is spam really that big a problem anymore? My webmail account has a spam blocker that removes the vast majority of spam. The rest is easy enough to delete. I don't see what the big deal is.

Besides, once I get my 10 percent cut from the Nigerian Wire Transfer I am facilitating, I will have too much money to care.

[PapayaSF]

J., that is somewhat true, but 1) if it merely made spamming less profitable, it'd help somewhat by eliminating some of the marginal spammers and cutting the profitability of the remaining ones, and 2) there has been no ad campaign attacking lotteries, psychics and Keanu Reeves movies as scams and the people who patronize them as idiots. Don't ignore the power of a good ad campaign! So I'd say my idea is worth a shot.

P.S.: Actually, I support lotteries as more ethical than taxes.

[Lonewacko]

The Lonewacko Blog's official position is close to that of the first comment.

I use pine to filter out spam that gets through my ISP's filter. Because it's on the server-side, I don't need to drag over all those emails. Some email clients also have a 'just get summaries' feature.

As for the ads, I don't think they'd do much good. The replacement rate for suckers will far exceed any PSA ratings.

[Ron Hardin]

If Microsoft is doing it, it will authorize payment to everybody in your address book and propagate to each of them.

[snake]

Use of a Bayesian filter has already put me a mostly spam-free world. PopFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net) catches spam for us with about a 98% accuracy, with most errors being false negatives, i.e. it categorizes something spam as not spam on about 90% of the erroneous classifications. I get about 200 spams a day, and it takes me about 2 minuets a day to manage them. It is not a problem.

[dj of raleigh]

> What are spammers going to do in response, identify themselves publicly and produce evidence that their penis-enlarging pills really work?

[Ellie]

Apparently, spammers actually make very little money off their pills, diplomas, and hot girl-on-girl pictures. It's really more of a pyramid scheme where spammers try to collect more addresses to sell to the people below them, the bottom being the ones who are offering a "product." Many spammers also use stolen credit cards to pay for their servers, so you wouldn't think criminalizing spam would be that much of a deterrent to people who were already committing fraud.

As such, I doubt an ad campaign would have much effect, as the money is not in your clicking on the email but in your having an address to receive it.

[Kai]

To follow up Ellie-- I read an article where the journalist spent days trying to actually buy all of the different services (mortgages, extensions of body parts, etc) and had very little luck doing so.

[PapayaSF]

I don't think Ellie is correct. If it were just about collecting addresses, why not just send emails offering "Free Information" and get them that way? That's easier than getting people to cough up credit card numbers.

No, most spammers want your credit card numbers for their miracle pills or whatnot. There has been at least one bust of a fake pill spammer, and he had a long list of customers who had bought pills to increase penis size, increase bust size, grow taller, and improve your golf swing. (And yes, all four pills were the same.)

Sure, they will sell your email address once you've responded and identified yourself as an easy mark, but that's not their main source of income. In any case, a "Spammers are Scammers" campaign would should cut down on the response rate, which means fewer email addresses for them to sell.

[Citizen]

If he really could end spam that would be a reason to knight him.

[AJMB]

Well, if Gates says he'll fix it, alrighty then. Is it too late to call bullshit?

[AndyinSDCA]

Spam is still a huge issue for one major reason, none of which have to do with the end user (you) getting emails about making your member bigger. Even spam that gets to a legit email address (say, your or mine) doesn't take that much to deal with. You just delete it. It is when spam is sent to a dead/bogus email address that the problem comes in. This typically generates a Non-Deliverable Report (NDR) that the receiving email server tries to send back to the "sender." The "sender" is ALWAYS a bogus email address, to the NDR sits in the queue, waiting to be delivered, assuming there isn't something in place to delete this kind of stuff.

[Dan]

In any case, a "Spammers are Scammers" campaign would should cut down on the response rate, which means fewer email addresses for them to sell

That seems really optimistic. If someone is stupid enough to believe a pill exists that can make his schlong grow 3", I don't think an ad campaign will convince him otherwise.

The spammers will just change their approach -- "this is the REAL pill, not the fake one you see on TV".

[Schlong]

There is a pill to make your scholong grow 3"?! Where can I get it?

[garym]

Spammers rely on huge volume and tiny percentages. That is, they can send messages to a million mailboxes at very little cost, and if they get two or three people to respond, they get their investment back (and I'm not talking just about what the sucker agreed to pay, once the credit card number is in the spammer's hands). So any "spammers are scammers" campaign would be ineffective unless it somehow persuaded every idiot in the world; the vast majority of people know enough to ignore spam, but it's the tiny percentage of suckers that keeps spam going.

Required payment is hopeless; spammers will just ignore it, as they ignore every other norm of honesty.

Some form of authentication could have promise, though.

[Walter Wallis]

Let them say what they will, just limit payment to those who accept regulation.
[You can not imagine how much that hurt my libertarian soul].

[garym]

AndyinSDCA: This distinction between delivered and non-delivered spam doesn't really make much sense. Reasonable mail server software can deal with bounces to non-existent addresses without holding it in a queue indefinitely. This shouldn't be a larger order of effort per message than manually deleting each of a hundred spam messages a day (and making sure you don't inadvertently delete any others).

Bounces to a real address, when spammers forge actual addresses (called a "joe job"), are more of a problem, since a single address can be flooded with large numbers of bounces and reach its quota, thus losing subsequent legitimate messages.