The Solution to Spam

I was just reading today on the register about how spammers have defeated the CAPTCHA protection to stop automated registrations with the major email providers.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/11/global_spam_trends/

Some time ago it struck me that there may be quite a simple solution to the whole spam issue, in fact I think my current ideas are based on a suggestion by none-other-than Bill Gates(!), who I think suggested having a 'stamp' or small cost associated with sending an email.

The idea is that if you can introduce a cost to sending email, no matter how small, it will deter spammers because when you are sending millions of emails, these costs rapidly add up and make the whole thing unprofitable.

I think this idea is really good, the variation I currently am thinking might be successful (I can't remember whether I read this or just came up with it after Bill's suggestion) is as follows:

Instead of having a fixed cost per-email, have every person creating an email account make a DEPOSIT. That is, a deposit of good faith to indicate that they are not going to use the account for spamming. Now the idea is, when someone receives an email that they regard as spam, they mark it as so, and through 'an undetermined mechanism', the sender loses their deposit.

There are 2 obvious variations here:

1) The deposit is large (say 10 pounds) and the sender loses access to their account on confirmation of spam activity.

2) The deposit is small (say 1 pound) and the sender loses the ability to send mail until they REPLACE the deposit.

The obvious problem is the problem of abuse by the receiver of the message. If they don't like you, or want to play a joke on you, they could classify your mail as spam and e.g. lose you a pound, which is unfair. So in a way you would need an impartial human to vet the reported spam and check it before giving the penalty.

Anything where there are humans involved becomes more costly. BUT WAIT!! If the spammer is losing their deposit, you can actually use this money to pay the checkers!! :)



It has occurred to me you could use a similar system for telephone spam too, if you receive an unwanted call, you simply press your SPAM button on the phone, and the caller loses their deposit.

Of course the issue is that a new email protocol would need to be used in order to prevent spoofing the sender, but if we bear in mind how long the existing system has been used, is it unreasonable to expect a revision, based on the experiences of use over the past 30 years? Any system undergoing widespread use usually shows flaws which can be corrected in a revision to the standard to make it more robust.

There is actually no reason why a new email standard could not be used in parallel to the existing system for a number of years, and if the benefits are significant, the market will adapt to using it.