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If only there was a way to do something similar with email. My "premium" @yahoo.com account would make a killing off everyone's newsletters and drip campaigns.
by callmeed 13y ago
If only there was a way to do something similar with email. My "premium" @yahoo.com account would make a killing off everyone's newsletters and drip campaigns.
- DennisP 13y agoThat's been proposed from time to time. If everybody charged a dime to accept an email, you could email back and forth with your friends at no net cost, but spammers would be out of business.
- spudlyo 13y agoOr alternately make the sender do something computationally expensive before their email can be accepted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system
- eli 13y agoThe problem is the bad guys have botnets. They're already not really paying for their CPU time.
- alcari 13y agoIf you require proof of work equal to, say, 3 "average modern CPU core seconds", they're still not going to send you spam because they could've sent spam to a few hundred other people in the meantime. It may not be costing them money directly, but it is a cost measured in a finite resource.
- eli 13y agoFundamentally, the system is always going to hurt the honest people running e.g. a developer mailing list harder than spammers who can take advantage of stealing other people's resources.
- throwaway0897 13y agoThe developer mailing list can digitally sign their messages with PGP, and all the recipients can add that PGP key to their whitelist. Whitelisted senders don't have to pay or do proof-of-work.
- eli 13y agoHistorically "just make everyone use PGP" has been a major issue.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoTotally breaks newsletters, of course.
- DennisP 13y agoNot if you whitelist.