Spam me and pay $500!

[Mr. Anderson]

Originally posted by alset
While I hated the idea the first time I heard it, I say let's have an email tax. If every email cost $.01 to send it wouldn't make much of a dent for the average person. Spammers who send over a million messages a day will be crippled.

Ah, the eStamp

It would be nice - yet there would be some issues. For personal accounts it wouldn't be too bad, but for corporations it would get expensive.

Logistically putting it into effect would be a disaster. And can you imagine having your email returned due to lack of postage?

D

 

[wsteineker]

What about a tax for bulk e-mailers. I'm not talking about corporate intranet e-mails, or even corporate mass mailings between offices, as they don't pose such a nuisance. But say that it was a tax targeted solely at spammers. Not a bad idea at all, really.

(edited for clarity)

 

[Doctor Q]

The trouble with an e-mail tax is that there is no central authority to collect it. It would have to be collected by every ISP, and they aren't likely to want to add to their overhead, annoy some of their customers (the ones who don't find it a welcome tradeoff if it lessens spam), or do work (tax collecting and recordkeeping) on behalf of Uncle Sam. And the Internet is international, so taxing cross-border e-mail would be almost impossible.

 

[rainman::|:|]

Originally posted by alset
While I hated the idea the first time I heard it, I say let's have an email tax. If every email cost $.01 to send it wouldn't make much of a dent for the average person. Spammers who send over a million messages a day will be crippled.

Dan

I know this is supposed to be a good idea, but I can't go with it-- I send tens of emails every day, business and personal alike... Businesses that use email would crack down so you couldn't use email for anything personal at all... it would just be bad all around...

someone asked how Mail's filter worked for us... i personally love it... it took it a while to figure out those spams that use no text, just solid images, but now it takes those away too. I love it, I check my junk folder every few days to make sure nothing valuable went in there, but it rarely does (and hasn't in months...) the filter is the best i've seen.

But that still doesn't do it for me... I want a cure for the problem, not a symptom. If Mail were suddenly unavailable, i'd be buried under spam in a way i don't even want to think about. it has to stop, it's crippling the internet's functionality...

pnw

 

[rainman::|:|]

Originally posted by wsteineker
What about a tax for bulk e-mailers. I'm not talking about corporate intranet e-mails, or even corporate mass mailings between offices, as they don't pose such a nuisance. But say that it was a tax targeted solely at spammers. Not a bad idea at all, really.

(edited for clarity)

The problem is again, how do you track it and how do you enforce it.

Spammers now use viruses that proxy send mail *totally* anonymously, as a matter of course. They're ruthless... and i say again, nothing will stop them short of redesigning the email system. I like it being so simple, but I guess we have to adapt it because of a few ****head spammers.


pnw

 

[Sun Baked]

Originally posted by pantheus @ news.spamcop.net 2003.05.22.18.01.01

On Thu, 22 May 2003 11:52:14 -0500, Jill wrote:

> What if Spam cop and related organizations considered offering up this
> suggestion to isp's:
> As part of an isp policy they could do a black list policy in which
> spammers pay extra fees after let's say a certain amount of abuse
> reports come in about them. After all the isp has to route the
> complaints, they should get something for the trouble, and to prevent
> future spammers, perhaps send a portion of spam money collected to
> organizations Spam cop and Spamhaus (since they deserve every penny they
> get) . ISP's would profit, spamcop could grow, it's all good. This might
> give isp's more incentive, and save the spam victims from having to pay
> for all that filtering software, time, headaches, resources, etc..etc...


Jill,

Nice thought ...but ...

The ISPs that are carrying most of the spew that gets into our inboxes are being paid premium prices BY the spammers (It's called pink contracts) already. They *know* who the spammers are, and since they are getting paid to carry the spam, they have no incentive to eliminate the cash-cow they are creating. The majority of the spam we see is from ISPs that will /not/ do the "right thing" (tm) even if it were shoved up their nose.

The blackhat ISPs: Verio, Rackspace, Exodus, et al are not about to stop the spam. Aside those US-based ISPs we have the Chinese, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, and several others with broken relays (and the refusal to fix them) that are accounting for the huge amount of spam we see.

The chickenboners at an ISP that gives a **** are far and few between. The majority of our spew comes from rouge ISP and broken relay/proxy and the professional spammers: Ralsky, Scelson, Betterly, Richter and the rest of the mob gangs. They are trying to find a way to legitimize spam with the backing of the DMA, as hard as we are trying to eliminate it.

 

[Doctor Q]

Ever have a brilliant idea when you are half awake, then wake up and find out that it made no sense at all? I had such a non-inspiration last week. While daydreaming, I thought of this plan:

Everybody picks an "e-mail codeword" and tells it to the people and companies that they are willing to accept e-mail from. Then they set a filter to remove all e-mail that does not have that word within the Subject field. For example, if someone had e-mail address stevie@apple.com and picked "clarus123" as his codeword, then e-mail to stevie@apple.com with subject "Hey Steve, send Doctor Q some free equipment [clarus123]" would go through but "Gil wants his job back" would be filtered out.

Then I realized that if you could somehow maintain a list of everyone you'd allow to e-mail to you (in order to inform them of your codeword), you might as well forget the codeword and simply set an e-mail filter to reject e-mail from other than those addresses. Furthermore, if you posted your e-mail address in a forum or on a web page or used it for business purposes, you'd have to include your codeword to make the e-mail address usable so the codeword would get picked up by spammers.

So, as Emily Latella would say, "never mind!"