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Buy stamps to Send
E-mail?
If the U.S.
Postal Service delivered mail for free, our
mailboxes would surely runneth over with more
credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and
supermarket fliers.
That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's
essentially free to send.
So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among
others, is now suggesting that we start buying
"stamps" for e-mail.
Many Internet analysts worry, though, that turning
e-mail into an economic commodity would undermine
its value in democratizing communication. But let's
start with the math: At perhaps a penny or less per
item, e-mail postage wouldn't significantly dent the
pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a
day. Not so for spammers who mail millions at a
time.
Though postage proposals have been in limited
discussion for years -- a team at Microsoft Research
has been at it since 2001 -- Gates gave the idea a
lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland. Details came last week as part of
Microsoft's anti-spam strategy. Instead of paying a
penny, the sender would "buy" postage by devoting
maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math
puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of
the sender's good faith.
Time is money, and spammers would presumably have to
buy many more machines to solve enough puzzles. The
open-source software Hashcash, available since about
1997, takes a similar approach and has been
incorporated into other spam-fighting tools
including Camram and Spam Assassin.
Meanwhile, Goodmail Systems Inc. has been in touch
with Yahoo! Inc. and other e-mail providers about
using cash. Goodmail envisions charging bulk mailers
a penny a message to bypass spam filters and avoid
being incorrectly tossed as junk. That all sounds
good for curbing spam, but what if it kills the
e-mail you want as well?
Consider how simple and inexpensive it is today to
e-mail a friend, relative, or even a city-hall
bureaucrat. It's nice not to have to calculate
whether greeting grandma is worth a cent. And what
of the communities now tied together through e-mail
-- hundreds of cancer survivors sharing tips on
coping; dozens of parents coordinating soccer
schedules? Those pennies add up.
"It detracts from your ability to speak and to state
your opinions to large groups of people," said David
Farber, a veteran technologist who runs a mailing
list with more than 20,000 subscribers. "It changes
the whole complexion of the net."
Goodmail chief executive Richard Gingras said
individuals might get to send a limited number for
free, while mailing lists and nonprofit
organizations might get price breaks.
But at what threshold would e-mail cease to be free?
At what point might a mailing list be big or
commercial enough to pay full rates? Goodmail has no
price list yet, so Gingras couldn't say. Vint Cerf,
one of the Internet's founding fathers, said
spammers are bound to exploit any free allotments.
"The spammers will probably just keep changing their
mailbox names," Cerf said. "I continue to be
impressed by the agility of spammers." And who gets
the payments? How do you build and pay for a system
to track all this? How do you keep such a system
from becoming a target for hacking and scams?
The proposals are also largely U.S.-centric, and
even with seamless currency conversion, paying even
a token amount would be burdensome for the
developing world, said John Patrick, former vice
president of Internet technology at IBM Corp.
"We have to think of not only, let's say, the
relatively well-off half billion people using e-mail
today, but the 5 or 6 billion who aren't using it
yet but who soon will be," Patrick said.
Some proposals even allow recipients to set their
own rates. A college student might accept e-mail
with a one-cent stamp; a busy chief executive might
demand a dollar.
"In the regular marketplace, when you have something
so fast and efficient that everyone wants it, the
price goes up," said Sonia Arrison of the Pacific
Research Institute, a think tank that favors
market-based approaches.
To think the Internet can shatter class distinctions
that exist offline is "living in Fantasyland,"
Arrison said. Nonetheless, it will be tough to
persuade people to pay -- in cash or computing time
that delays mail -- for something they are used to
getting for free.
Critics of postage see more promise in other
approaches, including technology to better verify
e-mail senders and lawsuits to drive the big
spammers out of business.
"Back in the early '90s, there were e-mail systems
that charged you 10 cents a message," said John
Levine, an anti-spam advocate. "And they are all
dead."
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