Microsoft wants to make spam senders pay for e-mail
Bill Gates is focusing on spam. The Microsoft Corp. chairman told the recent World Economic Forum, which dealt with issues of global import, that he envisions spam eradication within two years. One of the ways: making spam senders pay recipients to open the spam e-mail.
Microsoft has several research efforts underway to figure out ways to mitigate the impact of spam, including computational puzzles that spam-sending computers would have to solve before their e-mail would pass through spam filters. Because the puzzles are designed for human minds, spam-sending computers are not expected to be able to solve them.
Gates says he also wants to hit spam artists where it hurts most: in their wallets. He and others figure that spamsters could only override filter puzzles by using a huge number of powerful computers, making it too costly to send spam.
Microsoft is also looking into developing software that would let e-mail recipients bounce back incoming e-mail to force senders to first pay a fee. Although Microsoft says this option is one of the more future-oriented efforts it’s researching, a similar service already exists through Australia-based CashRamSpam.com. For a startup fee of AU$10 (about US$6.60), CashRamSpam will host a client’s e-mail system and act as a go-between to charge e-mail senders a fee before forwarding messages to the client’s inbox.
"All of these approaches are based on the concept that the solution for spam lies in changing the economic incentives for sending it," a Microsoft spokeswoman says.
Keith Powell, a senior manager in the retail practice at consultants BearingPoint Inc. and an expert in e-mail systems, says one common goal of producing tighter filters with puzzles and other methods is to set a minimum of about 10 seconds for spamsters to send a single e-mail message. With about 80,000 seconds in a day, that would restrict spamsters to about 8,000 e-mails per day instead of tens or hundreds of thousands. And with some spam campaigns based on getting as little as a single response per 10,0000 e-mails, this could make spam too costly, Powell says.
But he cautions that efforts such as computation puzzles and fee-based e-mail filters may be a long way from resulting in widespread use due to several issues. "Fee-based e-mail sounds intriging, but it assumes you know everyone who’s sending you e-mail," he says. He adds that recipients using a fee-based filter would have to deal with extensive maintenance issues.
Moreover, making new e-mail filtering techniques work on a broad scale would require the establishment of new standards for e-mail systems that have used the same basic standards for more than 10 years. "It could take years to get rid of the old systems," he says.
Microsoft, however, says it’s committed to continued investment in anti-spam efforts and cites its innovations in "machine-learning" technology built into its new SmartScreen e-mail filtering system. SmartScreen, which is built into Microsoft’s Hotmail, MSN and Outlook e-mail applications, is designed with an enhanced ability to score incoming e-mail for spam properties and block spam before it enters inboxes, Microsoft says.
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