Make spammers pay, in money or time, to send bulk e-mails By Mike Langberg
Mercury NewsImagine a world where the government paid all the bills for the postal service, and the cost of mailing a letter was zero. We'd be drowning in junk mail, because marketers could crank out postcards and fliers for a few cents each and send them for free. The humble 37-cent stamp and its bulk-rate cousins, in other words, are barriers preventing abuse of an important public resource. Yet we now live in the online equivalent of a no-postage world, because the cost of sending electronic mail is so near to zero that spammers thrive when only a handful of suckers respond to the millions of messages they send. There's an obvious and tempting answer: Create an e-mail postage system that charges senders a tiny amount, perhaps just one-tenth of a cent a message. Continued @ The Kansas City Star
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 | | Paying won't help I do not think paying for email will help. Who pays? The guy who got spoofed with 2000 emails a day? If the gov't can't figure out who's doing the spoofing and shut them down, then they certainly can't figure out who to charge.
I am the victim of a "joe job" and if I had to pay for each of those illegal emails I'd be bankrupt.
This is a very bad idea.
Think about it, to charge the right person and not end up with a huge problem here, wouldn't the billing have to be directed towards the person who hit the "send" button? And if that person was known, why not just block them now?
I see too many horror stories here. | |
|  | | | Re: Paying won't help I've had second thoughts about this. Still I say NO to charging for email.
However, there is a way to control spam, spoofing, and legitimate advertising...
In reasearching the spoofing thing that is forcing my art gallery web site to close, I've learned that most of the spoofers are offshore and almost all of them own their own equipment to host their sites. Thus complaining to the host is just an open ticket for more spoofing.
But they all have to register their domains with a registration service. Now from what I've learned, the registration services like Twocows, etc, are quite vocal about saying they do not investigate abuses of their registrants and will not take any action. It is not their job.
Well, a sure fire way to stop the spoofing is for the registrar to deregister the abusers.
So, I say we get rid of this system where every Tom, Dick, and Harry can run a registration service and either governmentalize it, or force regulations that make the regisrar take action. The latter is my best choice, but the former works too.
I recall some years ago when there was discussion as to whether or not the U.S. Gov't would be running the registration service for IP addresses. Everyone hated that idea. Well, I have no doubt the gov't would not hesitate to pull the plug on the illegal sites if they were in control.
The "joe job" spoofers are identifiable. Their domains are in the emails they send out so that they can get credit on sales through the referrer code. Emailing the domain simply confirms that they have a valid spoofing operation. Emailing the registrar that issues the IP address gets one of those "we don't care, its not our job" responses, if any at all. Emailing ATT who sells the bandwith is a black hole. Emailing any gov't agency that claims to be willing to help is pretty much useless unless you're Amazon or Ebay or Yahoo huge provable financial losses from spoofing.
So, the one link in the chain that can fix this is the registrars and we let them go unregulated with a "howdy doody, enjoy selling those IP addresses and don't do anything if the buyer continually commits illegal acts because its not your job." | |
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 ssj4androidRedefining Reality
join:2002-04-14
Wyoming, MI | Horrible Idea IMO At least, without some way of sending the emails for free if they're on a whitelist by the receiver or something. What about mailing lists? If all email cost to send, they would die. Also, if money is charged, who gets it? I think email would die if this ever happened. People would move to something else, probably IM, which they are anyway. I'm not sure if any of that is discussed in the article, since I'm not going to sign up to look at it. | |
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