nm

0_o

He got what he deserved. Although I am no fan of spam, I hate Microsoft's idea for charging for emails. He can go to hell.

this article is barely in english... did a real human write it?

i wonder how much sj gets spammed. and how does mail handle it. does sj use mail?

I would be more than happy to pay 3 to 5 cents for each email I send. That's a relatively small about of money and would be worth it if it puts the spammers out of business.

What's wrong with charging a penny an email?

I don't see a problem with this.

It would certainly slow down spammers that send utterly rediculous spam because they don't care if they get 100,000 misses and 1 hit. Would that one hit be worth $1,000 to them? I'd say no. So, I guess they wouldn't send it next time, right?

I think it could actually increase the quality of email you get and reduce the quantity of junk mail considerably.

You do realize that you are probably paying more to your ISP because of the bandwidth associated with millions of useless junk mail messages, right? In the long run, it could potentially SAVE a tremendous amount of money for everyone.

Some of these messages MUST have more like a 1,000,000 to 1 hit ratio, right? Here's a quote from an email in my junk folder: "landlord in SGp the slater of coverall workman but catchup ! process in dis or parade but 5976929 is withheld of laughter " and in it are instructions to copy and paste a url into a browser. I can't IMAGINE that this has gotten a single hit by ANYONE.

The key to making the charge fly is letting the person getting the email get the penny. You can use the penny to send someone else an email so if you send about the same amount as you get it still stays free. Spammers though would have to pay through the nose.

So how would you enforce the payment for companies in small little countries all over the world.

They can't even tax gambling and port sites that are located overseas.

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Anonymous wrote:
So how would you enforce the payment for companies in small little countries all over the world.

They can't even tax gambling and port sites that are located overseas.

An ISP could block any e-mails that don't also come with that penny.

It would only cost people who sent e-mail to THAT particular ISP. It doesn't matter WHERE you are, if you're sending mail to, say, AOL, it will cost you a penny to get it past their filter. That's very simple.

If someone tries it, and it works, can you bet how fast it will be before EVERY ISP doing it?

I can't say it's a bad idea. I'd have to try REALLY hard to spend $20 a month on e-mail with that plan.

Is that worth killing spam? I don't know...

So then, who collects the penny for each email? Would it be a new tax? The ISP of the sender, of the reciever?

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Anonymous wrote:
So then, who collects the penny for each email? Would it be a new tax? The ISP of the sender, of the reciever?

The ISP of the receiver charges the sender.

In a perfect world, there is legislation that they have to use that money to then lower the cost of internet service to their customers.

So if you send an e-mail to someone@aol.com, your bank account sends a penny to AOL. When your friend send you an email at someone@verizon.net, they pay verizon.

If the legislation I mentioned works, you may pay $10 for e-mails each month, but you'd see your internet access become $7 or $8 cheaper or something.

No ISP would be required to do this, but if it actually WORKED, then the ISPs that do it could claim they have little to no spam and it only costs you a few bucks a month. In that case, every ISP would be doing it soon...they'd have to or they'd go out of business.

I understand this will never happen, but I'm just saying it COULD work.

Wanna buy rreally cheap V!AGRRA?

I wonder if they included the bug reports into "Bill Gates" total. I'm sure he has it set up so that all bugs go directly to the spam folder and eventually to the recycle bin.

Getting serious, what would be the intent of adding cost to email? I know this issue is complicatet but I'd like to respond to a couple issues raised in this thread.

A) Services rendered should be compensated (i.e., bandwidth cost).
Hmm, do you really think email is clogging ISP traffic? Seriously, most users have well under 1000 spam emails per address per day. A quick look through my box found most spams were under 10KB. So, worst case, let's say that the average user has 1000 (spams/address/day) * 10 (KB/spam) = 10 MB/address/day. Hmm, hardly a big bottleneck there. In fact, I suspect that the majority of bandwidth costs are mostly from legal and illegal program and media downloads.

B) Force spammers to stop
Ok, I can see a bit of a point here. If every email costs a penny, no one will send ridiculous messages full of nonsensical garbage to millions of recipients. However, are we abandoning the concept of mailing lists? What about the limiting of communication? Further, don't think that unsolicited email will end. Snail mail advertisers figured out a way to get around this cost problem decades ago (good old bulk rate discounts offered by, surprise, the Postal Service).

If an ISP wants to require email costs, go ahead, it's your service, your perogative. Believe me, that ISP will be avoided like the plague by people who like (mostly) unlimited communication rights.

Bill deserves every piece of spam he gets.

Sort of related:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59650-2004Nov18.html

It's a chat about Phishing.

They talk a little bit about standards for e-mail...and how it's possible, but the tech industry needs to decide on a standard.

The idea behind that is that if you get something that looks like it's from the bank, how can you PROVE it came from the bank? It's nearly impossible now, but maybe that will change soon.

And it doesn't involve charging anything for e-mails.

A penny per mail wouldn't be so bad from a cost point of view but who would get it and why should it be so much more than the cost of providing the service? Maybe if ISPs had a commensurate reduction in charges paying would be acceptable but we aren't talking about micropayments, we're talking about nanopayments.

Most spam these days originates from computers taken over by crackers due to MS's shoddy products. As the spam mess is to a great extent caused by MS I have absolutely no problem with Bill Gates suffering more than anyone else.

I do have a problem with everyone who sends mail having to pay more because of an MS caused problem. ISPs who allow spammers eventually get their servers shut down (disconected from the network), this would work except for the fact that most spam is now sent by cracked computers.


Disclosure, I get about 100 spam emails daily, last year the email host I use most introduced charges for email to deal with spam, so I am paying already*. I consider it a tax which has the effect of subsidising MS's shoddy business practices and products (they don't pay to fix their problems, I am paying for the consequences of their faults).

*The standard mailbox decreased from 10MB to 2MB unless fees were paid and 2MB is too small for me.

There is a solution to spam. I can't explain in full right here, but the idea is like this:
Set up an email credit tracking server. Everyone who signs up (free) gets an email account on it, and a thousand credits. Get your friends to sign up too. Whenever anyone sends an email to someone else in the group, a credit is transferred to their account from your account. No more credits, no more sends. Receiving email, of course, means you get more credits. Sending spends them. Accomodation must be made for things like newsletters; this is easy, because you just request a reply be returned. The replies transfer credits back to the sender. Nobody will reply to spam, so those accounts will be exhausted shortly. Once lots of people are using it, instead of open-range email, spam will almost completely die off.
--- Eric Wadsworth, wad_at_acm_dot_org

This won't work. The spammers already hide behind other people's e-mail addresses. I've been getting 300 messages a day from spam sent to full mailboxes using my e-mail address as the sender. I didn't send it. I don't want to get charged a penny each for all of those. Somebody's virus sent them from some other computer.

Mad Magazine had an article about water being injected into ham, and one official's solution: to raise the price of water until it was more expensive than ham.

Again, I don't really support a pay-for-e-mail system, but consier it this way:

What if charging for e-mail made so much money for the ISPs that internet acces (BROADBAND access) could be provided for free?

What would you think of that?

Just like advertisers pay for network TV now, it would be the e-mailers who pay for the internet.

Yes, you'd be paying too, but you'd pay based on how much e-mail you sent...the actual internet wouldn't cost anything.

Even IF you run a mailing list and send 3,000 e-mails a month, that wouldn't cost much more than you're paying now for internet, would it?

Maybe not...but if it COULD work that way, would you go for it?

(Again, I don't REALLY think this would work, but it's an interesting thought.)

I think the problem with charging is that it would lead to the disenfrachisement of certain portions of society. A penny might not seem like much to you, but in certain areas of the world it is quite alot. I have seen internet stations set up by humanitarian groups in places such as Palestine as a way for refugees to attempt to find lost relatives or friends. The surcharge that you propose would be an incredible burden to people that are already subsisting on twenty US dollars or so a month. And what about the poor in this country? One of the most popular services provided at the library where I work is free internet access. It provides a way for many low income and
homeless people to stay in close contact with friends and relatives that was nonexistant even a decade or so ago. For some of these people the price of a stamp is quite a burden. There must be some way to cut down on the amount of spam that is generated, but creating what would basically become a regressive tax is not, in my opinion, the clean cut solution it first appears to be.

With that much email solicitation, Bill Gates could quite likely become the most well-financed, pain-free, well-endowed, virile man in all the Americas.

You people are insane to think that email should be paid for and that to doing so would lower your ISP costs.

Do you even know how much bandwidth a single piece of spam uses? Lets look at Postini stats.

16.1 Terabytes in the last 30 days. So round it off to .5TB of spam a day or 4194304 Mbits. Now divide that out to Mbits/sec and you get 48Mbit/s. That my friends in the grand scheme of things is an infitesimal amount of internet/cable/cellphone bandwidth. Even if you extract it out and count other spam services and non-service bandwidth, it still that isn't that much. Heck, I have that much in Website traffic bandwidth alone!

I have been an ISP Network administrator for near a 10 years. ISPs don't want to add any more complexity to their billing than it already is. And they certainly don't lose any money either filtering or passing along spam.

The only caveat to that would be they would have another reason to extract more money from you!

People seem to take the idea of charging for email as always meaning the money goes to the ISP. I think a better idea would be that the *recipient* gets not money, but the *option* to collect money from the sender. This way legitimate mail would remain free (supposing you won't charge your friends for sending you mail) and this would still fight spam.

We should work to delay any legislation that requires you to pay for e-mail, even if it's only a penny. Once it is made into law, or standard practice, you’ve just opened the door. The government is infamous for increasing taxes/fees from one penny, to two pennies, to three, and so on. How much did you pay for postage stamps 10 years ago? How about 15 or 20 years ago?

Why does it need to be a full penny? Maybe 0.1 cents would be better on us and still work on them.

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Anonymous wrote:
We should work to delay any legislation that requires you to pay for e-mail, even if it's only a penny. Once it is made into law, or standard practice, you’ve just opened the door. The government is infamous for increasing taxes/fees from one penny, to two pennies, to three, and so on. How much did you pay for postage stamps 10 years ago? How about 15 or 20 years ago?

Again, as I've said several times, I don't think this is a good idea. I'm enjoying arguing for this idea, even though I don't think it's a good idea in reality.

That being said, it wouldn't be the government charging you, so comparing it to postage stamps isn't really the best example. Each ISP would be competing with each other over the best price they could provide. That's a bit different than with postage stamps.

Whats the difference? If you are paying for the ISP or the e-mail it still costs money and its still not free

Yeah you can start it at a penny and no one will mind shelling it out, but what about when it double to 2 cents because the government decides this is a cash cow. Then 30 years from now people will say "remember when emails used to cost a penny" "now 99cents per email sounds good". The internet is free. It should stay this way. It is an equalizer for people all over the world. Rich or poor. Everyone should be able to email as many friends as they want and as many times as they want. If you give the government an inch they will take a foot!

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Anonymous wrote:
Whats the difference? If you are paying for the ISP or the e-mail it still costs money and its still not free

Uh, right. That's the point.

If you were gonna pay for e-mail, would you want choice:

1) No difference...you pay the same, but it's for e-mail, not access

or

2) Difference...you pay for access AND e-mail

Which one sounds better?

that's funny, i wont miss to add billgates@chairman.microsoft.com and steveb@microsoft.com to my mailing list... lol

anybody who still gets spam is really out of it. quit sending your email to everyone you meet! if you just use some spam blocking software it's perfectly fine...like APPLE MAIL! most ISPs provide spam blocking programs that work great except AOL because AOL blows because you pay $20 a month for an internet service that serves you up ads in your inbox

for example my Alltel dsl blocks spam and one or two spam emails get through every 2 weeks or so. so then apple mail gets it.

i really dont understand how people still get spam, adware, and viruses when even on windows it's so easy to prevent. i dont even have antivirus software on windows! i just dont understand!

I bet today and thru the weekend he gets a couple million more than usual.

Honestly,... Do you think Viacom or ComCast would lower their internet charges if they made a ton more money from penny-a-mail emails?

How many of us think they would lower prices to us VOLUNTARILY?

how many of us think they would pocket the extra if given a chance?

There has to be Federal oversight & FORCED lowering of access costs if there is a charge for email...

Think about it...

Cynically (?)
John
Fairbanks, AK

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RealityCheckup wrote:


i really dont understand how people still get spam, adware, and viruses when even on windows it's so easy to prevent. i dont even have antivirus software on windows! i just dont understand!

Yeah, I'm with you. I put some custom filters in my e-mail everytime I see a new spelling of Viagra, but that's all I have. I get about 3 spam messages a day.

And my hotmail account (HOTMAIL, people) that I've had for at LEAST 5 or 6 years, only gets 1 or 2 SPAM messages a day.

paying for email is another way for isp's to make more money, just like paying for mp3's became a big business

and ya, they already have enough $$$ if every exec can drive a ferrari and receive a complementary early retrirement benefit of how many millions $$$?

if anyone wants to pay for mail, send one in a regular letter.

http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/printer/20/19638.html

It will never happen.. The RIAA can't even stop music downloader's. You people expect to see postage on email? How will the government enforce something that runs off of something so wild? They can't legally. The internet belongs to no government or person. Hence why the government won't step in in regards to piracy, music downloading, spam, or anything else in regards to the net. If they did that, other countries would either startup, or they would become angry. Either that or you would have a riot on your hands. I don't see people being happy about being charged a penny for every low level text email they send. I also don't see email companies supporting this.

Funny how Bill Gates thinks this is a good idea, he for one has an email company of his own, which is FREE! Sounds like a hypocrite to me.

4 million emails a day = 2,777 emails per minute...who's counting them and how could even micorosoft's system handle that much traffic without melting down?

There should not be any charging for email just like there is no charging for use of roads (except certain toll highways and busy hours). Bandwidth is already paid for when you subscribe for Internet Access.

Microsoft is pushing the concept probably because the right beneficiary is the one who provide the mail service, guess who provide that?

I heard another method that sounded interesting. You enter an amount of money ($0.01 - $1,000,000) into your email software (I suppose) that you are willing to *recieve* for reading spam. Then the spammers can decide if it is worth it for them to send an email to you. For every spam/email you choose to read you recieve your set price fee. This is interesting because if you wanted to sit at home and read thousands of email every day you could make money doing it! Not *my* ideal career, but I am sure there is someone out there that will do it!

Governments only screw things up, so getting them involved, whether it's by a tax, or forcing ISPs to lower prices is a horrible idea.

The ideal solution would be a system where everyone pays to send an e-mail, but that money goes to the recipient, not the ISP or government. For most people, it wouldn't make much difference either way. But you actually make money if you send less e-mails than you receive. If the ISPs could work out a standard for this, it's definitely the best solution. You could even get on spammers lists on purpose to make money receiving their e-mails.

one more note... there is an function of this method to read any email for free, which you would do for friends and family, or any email you WANT to read.

Using hijacked computers (because of MS's security holes) to send e-mails is not the reason we have spam. My company is an ISP (albeit a very small one), and I have an SMTP server. That's all I need. I can send a billion e-mails tomorrow with no reprucussions. A non-secure standard for e-mail is why we have spam. Don't get mad at Bill because you don't understand the situation.

I agree. It's between you and your ISP. It's not the government you're paying. All spammers go through an ISP don't they?

Maybe it could be incremental. You send 1000 emails a month, that's free. You send 1001, that's $10. You send 10,000, that's $100. Get the point? So would the spammers.

sj probably uses Entourage.

Only Microsoft would try this.