My "weekly" column has been off for six months. It's called a hiatus in the publishing biz...
But I'm back with a suggested pay-to-play email system that provides a "Free Market Solution to SPAM."
People complain about Junk Mail as well. Or they used to before there was SPAM -- who complains about junk mail anymore? Junk mail is swell. It's not pornographic (maybe I have the wrong ZIP code), it's annoying but generally manageable, and it does not threaten to shut down the benefits of Postal delivery. Junk mail can be kept to an acceptable level by market forces. The Post Office can raise of lower rates to control the amount. I think that can be added to email.Posted by jk at December 31, 2003 11:00 AM
At the risk of appearing to throw cold water on your free-market approach... I'll point out that the dynamics of this system, if employed, will be greatly distorted by "public policy" elements. Namely, the frighteningly inevitable e-tax and Congress's insistence that politician's spam "rights" not be infringed.
By way of support I'll say that the worst consequence of your proposal, if it doesn't work, is that it will fail and fade away. Even the most successful GOVERNMENT programs have more negative consequences!
Fair point, sir. But you cannot not start a business because you'll have to pay taxes on your profits.
I would hire some oleaginous ex-Clinton officials to lobby Congress on my behalf.
Posted by: jk at December 31, 2003 02:31 PMNot really mad at you. Spam is a sore point with me in general because of the quantity. I've been on the net so long that my name is almost certainly in every spam distribution list ever created.
A big part of my problem is that I am locked into a legacy mail system that I wrote 6-7 years ago that doesn't get along well with some really good anti-spam packages that are out there... and because some friends company mail goes through my private server, I can't afford to just change. Last time I tried it all fell apart... but I nearly had it back as it was before the phone call about why mail wasn't working arrived....
A whitelist was a simple solution with a minimal overhead.
As to your solution, it is a good idea. So good that there is a company that does just that. You set your MX record to point to them; all you mail is delivered and filtered for virii and spam and the cleansed ones are then sent to your real server. I can't remember the company name. I talked to them for a client in Summer 2002 which was a forever long time ago.
The downside is, they don't price per mail, they license fee per year and the prices structure is aimed at big corporations. Not for the likes of you and I at home or in our hobbit holes of work.
I like it. At the risk of exposing my severe lack of understanding of the actual system of the internet, could each ISP charge every customer .001 cents per email they send through their server? At this rate most of us would get charged just a few cents a year for our email, but a spammer would have to pay $1000 per 1 million emails sent.
Posted by: Silence Dogood at January 5, 2004 09:40 AM