It seems like the point of this is to reduce junk mail by forcing a financial cost to sending mail thereby causing the sender to really consider the content of their message before sending it—except there is a real cost associated with sending traditional mail and there is still a huge amount of garbage traditional mail sent out every day.
No. And I've heard proposals like this going back at least a couple of decades. The theory goes that if you make email expensive (at scale) charging even a trivial fee will make shotgun blasts cost prohibitive. While (very much in theory), a few cents won't deter the casual emailer. Though more likely, as with SMS at one point, people would find ways to route around the expensive pipe because bits are bits at the end of the day.
>> While (very much in theory), a few cents won't deter the casual emailer.
Better yet. Require proof of work where the receiver sets the challenge level. Now you can whitelist people by offering trivial challenges for them. If you really want to email me it's going to take 2 minutes of CPU time - this will be done by the new mail clients in the background, so individual personal cost is essentially zero but bulk mail will require significant resources to send.
That's where we got the idea of proof-of-work in the 90s [1]. The problem is that this makes legitimate use cases like mailing lists very expensive, while providing little protection against spam from botnets.
Don't take this the wrong way but... Oh great. Just as the environmental tire fire that is bitcoin and the other crypto-currency bros is winding down, let's replace it with email.
The primary reason why a proof of work implementation for something like bitcoin has a huge environmental impact is because it is a winner take all system. You have thousands of machines trying to do the same thing but only one will get there first and claim all the reward, making all that other work that was done a waste of resources.
At some point 1:N becomes prohibitively expensive for the sender, but that doesn't mean that there is wasted work.
edit: To clarify, not really promoting the idea per say, just commenting on the proof of work statement.
No no no, this one is actually genius. The cost to send an email some one who doesn't know you (and has a real, functioning email) becomes too high to do casually in terms of the base resource (CPU time), I literally could not spam even if I wanted to without throwing absurd resources at the problem, which presumably would also make detection and correction easier if some of these elder-abusing rackets are more profitable than that. But! I could still send you a real email.
It would come down to numbers of course on whether it was actually a good idea, and one of those numbers would have to be "how much work needs to be done before your average spam calling scammer is no longer profitable", but as it stands if there is a number sufficient for that that still allows for regular emails, then the incentive to burn machine time on sending out mass-emails is effectively removed.
But mail is always priced at a fixed rate. What if your inbox worked on a bonding curve, such that as it filled up it became more expensive to send to (except for whitelisted addresses you approve)? What if your inbox required that the sender owned a particular NFT (proof of membership in a community)?
I mean there are infinite rules to play with in that sense. That's what excites me about crypto.
> What if your inbox worked on a bonding curve, such that as it filled up it became more expensive to send to (except for whitelisted addresses you approve)?
When my inbox fills up with spam I can't get legitimate mail because my inbox is full wouldn't essentially the same thing happen? I dunno why not just use the whitelist and be done?
I think the most promising price scheme is one where the receiver can set it to arbitrary values. Are you in my contact list? Your price is zero. Are you one of my suppliers that likes to send me "new product" notifications every week? You can still send those, because I need to receive notifications from you, but your marketing department has to really want to talk to me because this will cost them 600 seconds of CPU. Did you come across my email on the Internet, and I don't know you at all? Sure, my email is in my signature for anyone to parse, but when you put it in the "To" field of your email client it will inform you it will take 300 seconds of CPU.
At the moment the cost of sending mail doesn't scale with the amount of mail you send. After spinning up a mail server the difference in cost between sending 1,000 and 10,000 emails is trivial.
By doing this, you'll encourage the commercialization of email. The people who can fund sending email will be the ones who send email.
Frankly, I don't think email is broken, as is. It is very easy to subscribe and unsubscribe to email lists, and spam filtering generally works. It is relatively easy to control one's inbox, and it is completely under your control, as opposed to the many other services that have tried to replace it.
There is really not that much junk mail in the traditional mail, in my experience. Probably it varies place to place, but it's much MUCH less than what I get in my gmail.
My experience is the opposite. I'm constantly getting junk mail at my home with no filtering, meanwhile gmail does a great job blocking unwanted emails.
I suppose it depends on how you count volume. I maybe get 2 or 3 pieces of "junk" mail a day, along with bill/renewal/etc. associated paper (most of which is handled electronically), and few other letters and packages. Certainly I get way, way more than that in email whether outright junk or the loosely-related result of being on countless industry lists, etc.
I get 10's of actual unsolicited spam emails per day that want me to click a link and run an exe, or buy Canadian drugs, or give bank account details so they can send me millions, etc.
I will say that Gmail seems to catch almost all of that historical sort of spam for me. But I get another 50+ emails per day (not counting those that are dumped in my spam folder--probably because enough people reported them as spam) that are various marketing because I once had a badge scanned at a show, someone bought a list of scanned badges from somewhere, I entered an email to download a doc I wanted to read, a PR pitch because I sometimes write for publications, etc.
None of this is exactly spam and I sometimes go on an unsubscribe binge (and report as spam anything without an unsubscribe) but it's still a flood of mail.
Are you a homeowner? I do get some legitimate mail, though always from companies that already sent me a digital bill I paid by auto-debit anyway, that just refuse to go paper-free even though I'm throwing away all the paper they send me. But the overwhelmingly majority of my mail is unsolicited refinance offers, just as the overwhelming majority of my SMS texts and phone calls are people claiming they heard I want to sell my house.
If communication wasn't worthless before, flooding money markets to drive interest rates to permanent zero finished killing it.
At least with email, most of it gets automatically filtered, though it is also quite annoying there when every company or contractor I have ever purchased anything from ever feels the need to send me every day updates on everything happening with their business.
I think amounts of different types of spam one gets is variable, but it's trivial to ignore email spam. Even a smaller amount of spam in your snail mailbox has some negative side effects over spam in your email mailbox.
* An overstuffed mailbox tells burglars you're away
* There's more waste involved - it mostly goes to landfill (unopened)
* An overstuffed mailbox leaves less room for legit mail (most email services are good at creating a focused mailbox, so there's not the same signal to noise issue there)
* ID theft is probably easier from intercepting a preapproved credit card application than being able to hack your email password
Email servers get hacked daily,
If you’re auto-sending payment to receiver , now there is an incentive for hackers , to spam themselves with your inbox and you pay out of your wallet for that.
Now, yes one could say, that’s no problem just have a multi-wallet approval method , so unless the second one approves, it wont.
But now that makes it a bit more complex, especially for newsletters where multiple recipients can be there.
Also, i just think overall
Paying to send emails is lame...
It sounds all cool and dandy, until it isn’t..
Getting spammed with newsletters from a writer ?
Unsubscribe (and if they still continue , mark as spam)
Having to pay to send newsletters, now just adds an extra step for new newsletter authors to fight against fraud , and constantly calculate if its worth it to send emails to a person, and when they’ll stop sending because of that. Pretty sure the receiver, wouldn’t be that much happy.
Nice idea though,
Who knows, a refined version of it might make sense.
A sibling comment thread makes the observation that proof of work with variable volumes of work set for different groups could be a good system. Like setting the work needed for your newsletter to 0, and complete unknowns take two minutes of CPU time, that sort of thing.
This was one of the original motivations to develop technologies that made cryptocurrency possible. Adam Back released the first proof-of-work implementation, Hashcash, in 1997 as a denial-of-service countermeasure.
The money (probably crypto dust) should be burned instead of sent to the receiver. There should be just a proof of payment (or proof of burn). Could also be replaced with a proof of work for some hashing that the computer do.
This is probably the list you remember. It got used a lot more before spam filters actually got good enough to protect most inboxes (a development that I think is way under-appreciated today). Clever people on message boards spent a lot more time trying to think up new ways to beat spam than they do now.
Edit - now with good ol' ASCI formatting.
—————————-
Your post advocates a
( ) technical
( ) legislative
( ) market-based
( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I believe it was HN's Paul Graham who innovated wrt spam filters.
The provider I used was onto it (I used Mutt over SSH with them and all spam was in a seperate folder due to procmail IIRC but later they added spam and virus filters which you could customize), that was before Gmail existed though. They do the same, for free, but you pay with your privacy.
...or you could just mark your spam as such and block the sender to reduce future junk mail without ruining a nice system of essentially free global communication for everyone who uses it as such.
The weirdest thing about this proposal to me is that it picks the use case where the proposal is backwards. If someone is receiving a valuable newsletter they actually want to receive, the recipient ought to be paying for it. Senders would need to be paying for emails that people don't want.
If newsletter senders are paying to send out they're going to have to then have some sort of separate charging mechanism from the recipients to get them to compensate the sender.
I was thinking about this too. If I had valuable information, why would I pay you to give it to you? This deincentivizes the free sharing of knowledge through email. Most people will opt for cheaper and more efficient communications methods for noncommercial communication. When that happens, the spammers will follow anyways.
And since blockchains are public, you need to address anonymity and communications tracking (what the spooks call metadata): public keys are pseudonyms and there has been a lot of successful research on decloaking “anonymized” data.
You just need a handshake where the receiver sets the level of work required. Now you can whitelist people. You can also provide modest levels of work for "more reputable" email addresses, and set the default high for everyone else.
I don't understand what problem is this system trying to solve, it just seems overcomplicated to me.
> there should be economic incentive to only communicate valuable information. Sending an e-mail should cost "something".
Why wouldn't this be solved by attaching a simple POW to every message? The trust thing is a non-issue, you'd just whitelist people or domains you trust.
“How does one earn reputation? By sending emails which are not marked as spam.”
So I just do a sybil attack of sending messages to accounts I control, and not marking them as spam? Avoiding Sybil attacks ain’t so easy when you’re building a peer to peer and permissionless system.
Oh and it gets better… this reputation can then be milked for all kinds of things:
”In a system where we want to incorporate some kind of reputation system, after reading the message, the recipient could publish an acknowledgement on the chain with an indication of how valuable the information was. This could be as simple as yes/no/abstain. There would probably need to be rules here to prevent gaming the system. For example, the weight of the acknlowedgement could decrease over time. The pricing mechanism could then be based on your reputation.
The reputation would be stored in a token, and a set of smart contracts would goven their behaviour.
Reputation could be fungible (ie if I have 10 reputation, I can "endorse" someone else up to 10-N reputation, N tbd, for example - there could be other endorsement rules). This could permit anyone to create multiple pseudonyms which, with some ZKP magic, all "share" their reputation, but cannot be linked. This could even work across networks.”
So basically, the whole system would be built on “reputation” credits that are easily obtainable by creating lots of fake identities, to “mint” reputation tokens by colluding.
Great, another cost to making free software. As if building installers for difficult platforms and moving targets (macOS) and dealing with antivirus software (code signing certs cost $$) wasn't enough, now charge me for sending a newsletter. Everyone is a company, right?
Edit, having read the article: If you're going to put that much cryptography into it, why not give a unique key when you subscribe? That way you can unsubscribe or reduce volume at any point, by dropping messages with that key (and all messages without keys). As usual, what is the extra blockchain for?
This proposal seems to make the assumption that senders need their incentives adjusted - you need to pay some amount to send someone a message.
I can't see anything that stops a perverse incentive being created on the recipient's part: Why wouldn't I create a harvesting mailbox which signs up for as many messages as it can to generate income?
It seems like there would need to be a feedback mechanism so that senders could tell who was actually a recipient worth paying to talk to.
Almost every proposal for micro transactions for email involve the sender bearing the cost only if they don't want the email. This proposal would make everyone have to pay.
I like the idea of using the blockchain to handle the micro transactions, but I'd rather only have the money put in escrow until the reader opens it and either accepts or rejects it (or it goes back to the sender after 10 days or something).
You could eliminate a lot of complexity by first checking if the email itself is signed. If it is from someone you know then you are done. If it is not from someone you know (i.e. anonymous) you would then kick in some sort of external reputation system ... or not even bother, just add a bunch of spam points.
I think that sometimes we forget that we are almost always sending and receiving anonymous emails and how weird that is.
This seems like just another attempt to shoehorn blockchain into a system where it has no place and offers few advantages. Plus, I very highly doubt that a system that charges users to send e-mail would see much adoption.
All of this is offered to solve a problem that a user can solve by right click->mark as junk in most e-mail clients.
>Plus, I very highly doubt that a system that charges users to send e-mail would see much adoption.
Yup - I'm certainly not going to volunteer to pay more :p
Spam filtering. It's not perfect but it is effective. I agree wholeheartedly with this being just another excuse to insert the pet technology of the day - which to day is Blockchain.
...while we're at it, if we are taxing senders why not also finally put a cost on metadata and user data e.g. by a fee that gets sent to a copyright collective... "little" basic income there we go ;)
The dig at capitalism is a bit puzzling since this may be the perfect setting to demonstrate the principles of capitalism. Let them deploy their capital and see how market responds. Their theory is that "sending an e-mail should cost something". Maybe that cost is $2.30 per message, and maybe its $0.0000000023 per message. Either way its their capital at stake.
A lot of the passion/hobby newsletters I receive would not exist if the person writing them had to pay to send the emails. Adding a cost to distributing information does not increase the quality of distributed information, it just increases the percentage of information distributed that is trying to make the sender money.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the article. Are they talking only about marketing newsletters or just any kind of mass-emailing? Because sure, I'd support adding a toll to sending marketing emails. If your intent is to sell something, it should cost you some money to advertise.
Any email. But the receiver could refund/credit/whitelist certain senders; there's no reason this mechanism would have outsized impact on hobby lists other than the subscriber would have to somehow mark them as "safe".
In theory, this whole approach should work pretty well. I doubt the practical hurdles are surmountable, however.
The "prove-work-to-deliver" approach seems to have all the same benefits without a complicated, slow, and privacy-impacting ledger.
Maybe I’m missing the point, though?