3 ms·

This will just put a lower-bound on the market for spam emails, at the cost of making legitimate email more expensive (especially at scale). It doesn't matter i

This will just put a lower-bound on the market for spam emails, at the cost of making legitimate email more expensive (especially at scale). It doesn't matter if it's a micropayment through bitcoin or hashcash. The only real way to solve the spam problem is a web-of-trust where spam is disincentivized because it harms your reputation in the system. That is kind-of the situation we have now, except encryption isn't baked into email yet (if it will ever be).

jwatte 12y ago
Why is it a problem if legitimate email costs $0.01? If it's not even worth that to you, perhaps it's not so "legitimate" after all. (Organization internal mail doesn't need to pay itself) The main casualty would be mailing lists, which would likely have to move to forums or subscriptions. It might be technically possible to also say "I accept mail from X without demanding payment" but that's not necessary to make a pay-for email market work, and have much less spam.
- ewillbefull 12y ago
  $0.01 is just arbitrary. Some people might find that too expensive, and some spammers might find it cheap enough to profit from anyway. The problem is that the threshold for affordability is in NO way attached to the profit margins of spammers, let alone the true value of the email. And your last point is really just a specialized form of a web of trust anyway.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  The usual objection is mailing lists. A large list may have hundreds, thousands, and potentially millions of recipients (though I'm not aware of any such at present). The Debian Project provides email subscription stats, with its biggest list being debian-security-announce, at 34,234 subscribers. That's a cost of $342.34 per message transmitted. https://lists.debian.org/stats/ https://lists.debian.org/stats/ It would also be a large overhead to any system with a large userbase that relied on email based notifications. Facebook's financials put its per-user revenues at around $8-$10/year, which would be completely eaten up at the rate of only 3 emails per user per day. The thing about email is that it's really, really cheap. That's the benefit and the detriment to the system. What you want to do is make the costs asymmetric. Cheap for legitimate and white-hat users, really expensive for the black hats.
  - elpool2 12y ago
    Could you combine it with a whitelist system? Email from people on your personal whitelist always makes it through for free while email from strangers always costs $0.01. Anyone signing up for debian's mailing list would just have to click a button to add it to their whitelist, same for anyone wanting to receive email from Facebook.
    - dredmorbius 12y ago
      My read: not really. Micropayments are too fussy in a whole lot of ways. Though of course, if someone wants to prove me wrong they're free to try it.
wpietri 12y ago
The solution I'd like to see isn't payments but bonds. E.g., on every email I send I can offer $5. If the recipient thinks the email isn't worthwhile, they can claim the $5 for themselves. If the balance for my bond account doesn't have enough money to cover the bond, that's a great signal that the email is spam. Legitimate email would still end up being free, but spammers would have a much harder time getting mail through. And large mailing lists would be forced to be pretty responsible. Or to offer very small amounts per mail, which would be a great signal to file something under "promotions".
- munin 12y ago
  Why wouldn't I claim a bond on every e-mail I received from e.g. google and twitter?
  - nhaehnle 12y ago
    Why not, indeed. The question is whether that would be a bad thing. It could serve as a great signal to those companies that they shouldn't send you any email.
    - rmc 12y ago
      What about, say emails from police or courts, who legally required to contact you, and you don't want to receive it?
      - icebraining 12y ago
        What about it? If you claimed the bonds, they'd just require you to pay them back, possibly with interest.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    Then they would stop sending you email. And, presumably, close your accounts. My guess is that high-reputation places wouldn't feel obliged to offer large bonds, or wouldn't offer any bonds on communications for established relationships. They wouldn't have to, because their mail gets through. The bonds would be much more useful for senders with deliverability or attention issues. That is, individuals, small companies, and new companies. It could also be great for marketing. If somebody's willing to bet $20 that their email is interesting enough to me that I won't collect the bond, I'd be interested to read it.

jwatte 12y ago

Why is it a problem if legitimate email costs $0.01? If it's not even worth that to you, perhaps it's not so "legitimate" after all. (Organization internal mail doesn't need to pay itself) The main casualty would be mailing lists, which would likely have to move to forums or subscriptions. It might be technically possible to also say "I accept mail from X without demanding payment" but that's not necessary to make a pay-for email market work, and have much less spam.

ewillbefull 12y ago
$0.01 is just arbitrary. Some people might find that too expensive, and some spammers might find it cheap enough to profit from anyway. The problem is that the threshold for affordability is in NO way attached to the profit margins of spammers, let alone the true value of the email. And your last point is really just a specialized form of a web of trust anyway.
dredmorbius 12y ago
The usual objection is mailing lists. A large list may have hundreds, thousands, and potentially millions of recipients (though I'm not aware of any such at present). The Debian Project provides email subscription stats, with its biggest list being debian-security-announce, at 34,234 subscribers. That's a cost of $342.34 per message transmitted. https://lists.debian.org/stats/ https://lists.debian.org/stats/ It would also be a large overhead to any system with a large userbase that relied on email based notifications. Facebook's financials put its per-user revenues at around $8-$10/year, which would be completely eaten up at the rate of only 3 emails per user per day. The thing about email is that it's really, really cheap. That's the benefit and the detriment to the system. What you want to do is make the costs asymmetric. Cheap for legitimate and white-hat users, really expensive for the black hats.
- elpool2 12y ago
  Could you combine it with a whitelist system? Email from people on your personal whitelist always makes it through for free while email from strangers always costs $0.01. Anyone signing up for debian's mailing list would just have to click a button to add it to their whitelist, same for anyone wanting to receive email from Facebook.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    My read: not really. Micropayments are too fussy in a whole lot of ways. Though of course, if someone wants to prove me wrong they're free to try it.

wpietri 12y ago

The solution I'd like to see isn't payments but bonds. E.g., on every email I send I can offer $5. If the recipient thinks the email isn't worthwhile, they can claim the $5 for themselves. If the balance for my bond account doesn't have enough money to cover the bond, that's a great signal that the email is spam. Legitimate email would still end up being free, but spammers would have a much harder time getting mail through. And large mailing lists would be forced to be pretty responsible. Or to offer very small amounts per mail, which would be a great signal to file something under "promotions".

munin 12y ago
Why wouldn't I claim a bond on every e-mail I received from e.g. google and twitter?
- nhaehnle 12y ago
  Why not, indeed. The question is whether that would be a bad thing. It could serve as a great signal to those companies that they shouldn't send you any email.
  - rmc 12y ago
    What about, say emails from police or courts, who legally required to contact you, and you don't want to receive it?
    - icebraining 12y ago
      What about it? If you claimed the bonds, they'd just require you to pay them back, possibly with interest.
- wpietri 12y ago
  Then they would stop sending you email. And, presumably, close your accounts. My guess is that high-reputation places wouldn't feel obliged to offer large bonds, or wouldn't offer any bonds on communications for established relationships. They wouldn't have to, because their mail gets through. The bonds would be much more useful for senders with deliverability or attention issues. That is, individuals, small companies, and new companies. It could also be great for marketing. If somebody's willing to bet $20 that their email is interesting enough to me that I won't collect the bond, I'd be interested to read it.