Speaking at the WEF in Davos, Switzerland, Gates told a group of delegates that he could crack spam by 2006. The soon-to-be-knighted Microsoft chairman added that with the help of some canny tech measures, spammers would be hit where it hurts–in their fat wads of Viagra-inspired cash.Our Take: I have the suspision that Microsoft has already put into testing some of these ideas to battle spam ’cause for the past 2 months my Hotmail account has being virtually spam-free, receiving only about 3-5 spam messages daily, while before that time I was receiving about 60-80 junk emails on that email account alone.
These days the tables are turned: my osnews email account is full of spam and Hotmail is clean (and please note that my hotmail account is almost everywhere on the net and usenet for the spam-bots to find, while I was considerably careful for my osnews one).
For machines belching out huge amounts of spam day in and day out, however, the cost and computing power needed to send the e-mails off through the ether would be huge.
Does that means Microsoft Windows will add track records of email activities ?
I don’t need one more hidden “talkback” !
The idea goes like this: If you receive an e-mail from an old school friend, and you’re happy to receive it, the sender doesn’t pay. If it’s another offer of a porn subscription, you reject it, and the spammer is forced to cough up
Magic huh? how could we have ever doubted you Mr. Gates.
Don’t spammers hack servers or use relays anyway? now they can spam themselvs and get twice the revenue, brilliant I say will they be teaching courses on this new ‘inventive’ approach? Sign me up!
hey people!
be part of the solution, suggest other methods that will solve the menace called SPAM.
I bet you don’t like having your inbox full of worthless and useless junk emails.
Ok, first you have the problem that $0.10 or even $0.01 is a lot of money. MAybe not to you, but to people in developing nations where there is no current infrastructure for internet.
That means that we are effectivley raising the bar to get on the internet by a HUGE margin for these people.
What about non-spam email that is unwanted. Like flame mail? Or even letters to the editor? What if you want to email [email protected] and he doesn’t like your email? He can then charge you money? That seems unfair, and silly considering that it’s almost free to send/recieve email these days.
To me this just seems like a stupid way to solve the problem. The problem is that people are getting unwanted email, people already pay too much to get online, and this system would only make it more expensive to get online. The system itself would be expensive to build and still wouldn’t be as effective as a simple whitelist.
A bad thing in my opinion.
In a perfect world that could work. In the real world making people pay for messages that they sent based on what other people think of them will be abused far to much. I know I would use it against ex-boyfriends, people I don’t like, heck I would probably use it against friends just for kicks.
Lets say I don’t like a message board. I sign up a bunch of times then I make the site pay for all the confirmation emails.
On my throwaway Hotmail account (where the only email I get is spam), I have it set up so that all email automatically goes to the junk mail folder. However, I notice that any piece of spam I get from MS bypasses my filters and goes directly to my Inbox. So you see, the only thing these corporate bastards want to do is to eliminate spam in order to make room for their so called legitimate ’email marketing’ … in other words, they want the playground all to themselves.
Some people would say that the spam I get from MS is the ‘payment’ in exchange for using the service. However, MS advertises Hotmail as a free service, so either the email I’m getting from MS is spam, or else saying the service is ‘free’ is really false advertising.
You can’t just *charge* people for email. Who does the money go to? Who should it go to? Anyone who understands even the most basic design of the net will know that this isn’t feasible.
Also, spammers will wake up to the fact that their server’s cpu usage is high. They will lower the priority of their mailing program just enough so that the clients will accept them as being legit.
The ACTUAL way spam will be solved is with more advanced text filters and image filters that can recognise pornographic material and blue pills.
be part of the solution, suggest other methods that will solve the menace called SPAM.
Wake up. There is no solution. And if there were any some company would make it payable.
Until then make the best use of filters you can.
Just my opinion.
Ok, first you have the problem that $0.10 or even $0.01 is a lot of money. MAybe not to you, but to people in developing nations where there is no current infrastructure for internet.
People in developing nations shouldn’t be sending spam, anyway. So this is a non-issue. And if people were charged differently based on their country, spammers in rich countries would send their stuff through servers in poor countries.
What about non-spam email that is unwanted. Like flame mail?
You won’t go broke by flaming one person. Flame the whole world, then maybe. But then you’d deserve it. Another non-issue.
Or even letters to the editor?
If $.10 is what it costs to get an editor to read e-mail from me, then that’s $.10 very, very well worth spent! Just ask a writer!
While spam-mailing is a lousy and unethic way to market your products, there has to be people that are actually buying these products. Don’t ask me who could be so stupid, but obviously there are such people, because if it hadn’t worked no-one would bother marketing that way.
Perhaps it should be required to get a license for using the internet
Anyway, there are spam filters allready that works just fine, I set up spampal on my fathers box and it works like a charm.
The problem is though, that the people who are stupid enough to buy these products won’t bother installing a spam-filter. So the madness will never end until it’s there by default in outlook express.
I will believe it once I see it made a reality.
He is not revealing all the details, either because he is a good businessman, or because he’s only making hype.
For every two pennies you’d pay to get an email through, I bet MS will receive one of them. That’s a whole lotta pennies.
No way. Completely unpragmatic.
I don’t know what is more worse. Spam or ultimate software dominance of Micro$oft?
You can filter spam, but who can filter Billy’s Palladium?
I’m NOT glad with more tries of Bill Gates at the Rich Men Conference Ball called WEF to dominate everyones computer.
I wonder if Microsoft is trying to throw competetors off track. I installed spamassassin, spent a week feeding it all my spam. I didn’t check mail all weekend, I got 80 or so spams, 76 of which spamassassin caught, and pine sent to my junk mail folder. I’ve had one false positive, and that was a newsletter from doster about their new DNS services (arguably spam anyways).
I’m happy enough with it. I wonder if MS is just trying to make it look like one track (charging? come on), and building up a proprietary spamassassin in the background…
[hiden words]
And the feauture will be included on Windows LongHorn, so buy it.
[/hiden words]
…is to abandon the current mail infrastructure. E-mail has deviated so drastically from its original design goals and intentions as to create virtually “unsolvable” problems such as spam which can only be partially addressed by cobbling additionally complex mechanisms onto the existing system rather than simply starting over from scratch.
Spam is a problem that can only be addressed by alterting how mailservers communicate with each other. SMTP (with SMTP auth required) can still be used for communication between client MUAs and the mailserver… POP3 and IMAP can still be used for retrieving messages, although a specialized IM2000 message fetching protocol would be preferred. but the way in which mailservers communicate must be fundamentally altered.
Dan Bernstein (author of qmail) has put forth his proposal for a next generation mail system:
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
which has seen one prototype implementation:
http://ngmp.libretech.org/
IM2000 would require senders to notify receivers that a message is waiting, and then stay online long enough for the receiver to download the message from the sender’s mailserver. This makes spam somewhat impractical, a spam is typically sent in an enormous one-shot process. It also increases the tracibility of spammers dramatically.
I must say that he had some interesting ideas there. I especially liked the computation idea. The mail server could force senders to compute the answers to algarithms before an email were accepted, and if it took a desktop one second to complete the calculation, then the desktop user would hardly notice it, but the spamer would incure much more cost in sending.
Or how about this: you know those stange computer generated pictures with malformed letters and numbers that have began appearing on web forms to prevent automated use? Make the user do one of those!
All just ideas of course, and far from implimentable at this point.
something about a 10sec delay between sending emails and that that was going to stop spamming. I remeber the article, maybe a month or 2 ago.
Whoops beat me to it
I must say that he had some interesting ideas there. I especially liked the computation idea. The mail server could force senders to compute the answers to algarithms before an email were accepted, and if it took a desktop one second to complete the calculation, then the desktop user would hardly notice it, but the spamer would incure much more cost in sending.
Two problems:
1) The current mail system doesn’t require you to do it… therefore it won’t happen.
2) If the current mail system did make you do it, mailing lists would become as unfeasable as spam.
Well said thelight. No matter what you post here, it always seems like the comments are always from people whinning like babies.
Relax people. Why so much negative feedback instead of finding a better solution?
For all you negative people out there, you are pretty much part of the problem since you are not saying anything positive for the solution.
Thanks.
That’s right .. microsoft trying to tie one more thing to money, money .. more money. A solution that would end up costing consumers in not a good solution. Moving from virtually free to pay-as-you-send is not much of a progress. But Microsoft is microsoft, and I suppose a money-based racket is the only kind of solution one can expect from them.
Anyway, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to stop spam. A few opensource tools (spamassassin + but a couple of plugins, for example), is all it takes. We use spamassassin at work, and I get only 4 spams a day. The remaining two-hundred (per day and yes, we get that much!) is filtered directly into my junk folder. I believe yahoo has been doing the same since eternity, and I am surprised Hotmail just implemented this recently. Maybe microsoft is even using these open source tools to filter hotmail, who knows???
Eugenia, maybe you should try using spamassassin on your mail server if you haven’t done so already
…is to force everyone who wants to send email to register. Registration will be on providing a verifiable address where the email will originate. So every email server should have a certificate. Any server found to be sending out unsolicited mail will have its certificate revoked. Users can then choose whether or not to accept email from those servers. A user can then also choose to allow certain servers such as mailing list servers to send them email. Registration need only be done on an ISP level. It might raise the cost of service delivery up a bit, but there is always going to be a cost.
Legitimate mailers wouldn’t have to worry. The majority of mail nowadays is from these spam people. Maybe drastic is the right course of action.
Why did Bill Gates not suggest this for its Windows line.
Every time the system crashes or disfunctions the user gets 0.10 dollar cent. Oh i see…he would be very poor by now..
Can you imagne so,ebody to break in you “hotmail” account and
sends over 50.000 mails…bad idea. But he its coming from a person who has never had any good ideas so i give him the credit, thanks for your helpnig hand against fighting spam Sir. Gates.
Spam is not that bad actually. If used wisely. I like spam, there’s so much freaky funny stuff in there. But nevermind, two points: people really use it, it works, it doesn’t necessarily have to be viagra or porn sites, there are other services and sometimes they aren’t that bad at all. In some countries a war (almost) has started by software companies (like Kaspersky labs) not to fight spam, but to make it controllable by those companies. And I think in the end the spam won’t be gone, it will bring profit, and it will exist, only it will be sent by these software companies and not by normal people. It isn’t going anywhere. People everywhere are all about money. So when something brings money and is uncontrollable other big guys want to divide the revenue. This sucks, actually, because the Internet wasn’t meant to be as sick and unfree as it is now.
Our Take: I have the suspision that Microsoft has already put into testing some of these ideas to battle spam ’cause for the past 2 months my Hotmail account has being virtually spam-free….
I noticed it too. I used to receive 50+ mails on my hotmail account (which I only use for Messenger and registering on sites) till, suddenly, that quantity drop to maybe 3 or 4 daily.
I mean, where will I get my dick-enlargment pills and other excellent deals then, huh? Not to mention all the porn! Wise up people!
Having the sender compute something that takes 1 second or even ten seconds is a pretty bad idea.
Something that takes 1 second to compute on my PentiumX (whatever it will be when this is implemented) will take how long to compute on my cell phone? Any other embedded device?
Could you make this equal for all devices? So that it’s one second for everyone? Not without closed software, which is probably a bigger problem for me than for Bill…
“IM2000 would require senders to notify receivers that a message is waiting, and then stay online long enough for the receiver to download the message from the sender’s mailserver. ”
How could that work when the sender and receiver are on opposite sides of the planet?
The big advantage of email over the phone is that you can send a mail when the other person is busy or asleep, and he can download it when you are busy or asleep.
Abandoning the current e-mail infrastructure is not the right solution. It’s like saying that “all we need is IPV6 to solve the issue of IP addresses”. It works in the lab, but not in the real world.
I agree with Mattias, using CPU power is a definite issue. There are cell phones out there that have less than 2 MIPS of available CPU power to run the high-level applications, while current PCs can reach several GIPS easily. The current ratio isn’t far from 3600:1, i.e. anything that takes one second on a PC (meaning that a spammer with 10 PCs can send a million messages a day) will make your phone run at full CPU power for an hour (meaning that after 2 or 3 e-mails you’re out of battery).
The “payment-at-risk” solutions has quite a few advantages (and it is not a new idea, it has been discussed already). It doesn’t require any change to the current mail servers (it’s just an extra header), people can still use existing mail clients to receive e-mail (they just don’t have the ability to collect payments) or to send e-mail (they just risk having their mail marked as spam). The big problem is that it involves money, and especially international payments (ever tried to open a Paypal account linked to a non-US bank account? good luck!). Payment-at-risk is extremely similar to public-key authenticated e-mail.
mailing lists would become as unfeasable as spam
That is a good point, the only difference between mailing lists and spam are whether or not the mail is wanted. It might be possible to incorporate some sort of system where those who operate mailing lists were regulated in some way, however would probably require charges. If this were to happen, MS would make a profit on it somehow and we would probably see the end of project mailing lists for OSS projects (I prefer web-based forums anyhow).
On a lesser note, they’re not really going to knight him, are they? That’s a joke, right? Like Ha Ha, Sir Bill. Funny stuff? Please?
How about adding private/public keys the SMTP servers? This way mailservers could sign email and authenticate them, and users could set their account to reject all email from non-authenticated servers. Coupled with Secure DNS, this should make it easier to spot the offenders.
In this scenario, if you want to send email from a certain email address you would need to be the operator of the mailserver of that address. If not, you wouldn’t have access to the private key, and the receiveing mailserver would reject the message.
While spam would still be possible, abusing innocent people’s addresses would not.
Clarification: 1 set of private/public keys per server. This extension should be transparent to the users.
Dan, I don’t think that being on opposite sides of the planet would pose a problem. Two individual computers do not actually call each other to deliver mail. As I understand the IM2000 system, the ISP’s are responsible for caching the message, not the end user.
So in the scenario you described person A would send a message at 4:00am. This message would immediately move up to this person’s ISP (but go no further). A notification is then sent to person B’s ISP that there is a mail message waiting. When person B gets up in the morning and gets their email, their computer will contact their own ISP, download the notification of person A’s message, and then automatically retreive that message directly from person A’s ISP (which then deletes it).
The disincentive for spammers is that they need to cache the message locally until it is picked up. This means that 1) they have to have a bit of storage to keep these mails around till they are picked up (or their ISP does) and 2) that they have to be identifiable – i.e. if they don’t leave a “return address” no-one will get their mailings.
There is still the real possibility of spammers hijacking other systems. Still, this is a less viable option since they would either have to hijack a system directly connected to the internet and running a mail server OR they would have to hijack grandma’s machine and use it to send messages up to it’s ISP. This second case could be addressed by setting up ISP’s such that they will not send bulk emails (say, more than 150 messages more than once a day) unless directly requested by the end user.
Who but the most biased M$ apologist could see this as anything more of the same old tiresome ‘proprietary lock-in & charge, charge charge’ strategy that has made Gates a trillionaire.
—
commence censoring *now*
It’s up to the ISP’s folks. You give legit home users on the order of 50-100 emails a day ‘allowance’ in their monthly subscription, and then charge them $0.10 per email over the daily limit.
All of a sudden, idiots who have open relays will get huge bills and those holes will be plugged.
ISP’s could also charge for emails coming INTO thier systems, allowing 50-100 emails per day per account and either charging back for emails over that limit, or block emails above that limit. Again, people with open relays or poorly secured systems will find out real quick.
It have been said 100 million times.
The best solution will be to make the ISP’s responsible for the email traffic they produce.
It is not normal for anyone to send zillions of emails, that’s a traffic easily traceable at the ISP’s level.
Otherwise, current email infrastructure is not going to change easily, it may eventualy change some day, but unfortunately it won’t be built upon the current technology.
Email if one of these technologies which works well because it is open and free to implement (Yes that kind of OSS some people here do not like and never use
)
Reaching an agreement for a brand new, wide-open non-propietary solution is not going to be easy nor made tomorrow overnight.
“The best solution will be to make the ISP’s responsible for the email traffic they produce.”
ISP’s relay traffic. They do not produce it. If someone sends you poison in a can of coke in the mail, do the police go after the mail carrier or do they go after the person who commited the crime.
Either your reason is being over run by your emotion, or you are just looking for an easy target.
I get about 300 spams a day. I hate them. I’m starting to get nervous that I’m killing off real mail when I delete them in bulk. That does not mean I’ll blame the wrong party. Spammers don’t care if an ISP/someone with an email server gets hit. If that SMTP server goes away, they will find another. The person sending the spam is at fault. Punish them. If you can’t find them, punishing the wrong person will not help.