Spam in Gmail
In the past six months, exactly, I have received exactly 160,928 pieces of spam in my inbox. If every one of those had come in the mail, in addition to all the dead trees, I would have kilos and kilos of stamps to sell off as a “mission mix”. A pretty nice one, with Russian and Chinese and Nigerian stamps in there.
But of course spammers don’t pay for their mailings, instead making you pay for their mailings. That’s why they exist, and that’s why they are scum.
We need an efficient micropayments scheme in the world. A way in which we can give fractions of cents to people. We could have wireless agents and web agents do the negotiation for us. Set your phone so that if a beggar asks for money, it automatically gives them a nickel without showing up on your radar at all (this is a plot element of the sci-fi novel I’m writing.) We could, instead of challenge-response, just charge people a tenth or twentieth of a cent to email each of us. Nobody legitimate would notice (you’d have to send 2000 emails a month to have it cost you a buck) but it would stop the spammers dead in their tracks.
There’s more, but I’ll save it for the novel.
Email subscription
September 27th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
I think another solution I’ve heard of is incorporating a very small time delay per recipient - nothing that we would notice when sending something to a few friends at a time, but would certainly choke up the system of someone sending mass emails. I’m not sure what I would prefer.
I suppose I would prefer a method that didn’t require the exchange of money in any form and therefore didn’t mean one more database with my personal information in it.
And I agree with you - spammers are scum. Just downright rotten.
September 27th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Something dubbed “HashCash” has also been devised. It makes your computer spend computing cycles to send every email. It is so-named because the computer hashes (generates a profiling number) based on the recipient’s email address, the date, a public key for the recipient (maybe), and random sequences of letters and numbers until the string they are hashing “collides” with a given pattern, say, the first five digits being zero. The cost is then not monetary, but rather based on calculation.
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:50 am
Ah, that sounds about right. I would probably support that idea as long as it was executed well.