Mon 7 May 2007
A Dime a Chime
Posted by anaglyph under Spam Observations, Web Politics
[18] Comments
So I was over at Modern Mechanics having a browse as I’m wont to do, and I found this great article about an invention to keep canvassers and peddlers from ringing your doorbell.
The principle is simple enough – the doorbell won’t ring unless you first pay a dime into the slot, thereby discouraging anyone without a legitimate purpose. If you’re an approved caller, your dime can be refunded on opening of the door. If you’re just a hustler you lose your dime and it goes to charity. Brilliant enough – there are times when I would have found this mighty handy.
Then I had a brainwave (and I’m actually being serious here folks, for a change): take this idea and remodel it for the digital world and you have a fantastic method of stopping email spam in it’s tracks.
Now there have been a few different pay-per-mail schemes mooted in the past, but they tend to come from people like Microsoft who have a view setting up yet another revenue stream (and heck knows they really need it). They invariably operate on the principle that you make a micropayment for each email you send. In other words, it’s using the old Post Office concept – you stamp your mail to send it. And it costs you.
I’m suggesting something significantly different.
Here’s how I propose it would work: If someone wants to send you an email they must pay you a small fee – say the equivalent of a mailed letter. Their email goes into your Inbox and when you see who it’s from, you approve it and their fee is refunded. You only need to do this once for every sender.
Spammers would be completely stymied – sending millions of unsolicited emails would cost a fortune. Genuine advertisers could still send you email, but they would have to pay – and if you declined their dime, they would lose it.
The money would be held in some kind of escrow, and from time to time you would approve its donation to charity. The escrow slush fund could also finance the service that facilitates the process.
This idea also answers one of the the most widely-voiced objections to a ‘paid’ email system: that users would have to start paying for something that is already free. With my Dime Per Chimeâ„¢ scheme the end user doesn’t pay at all![tippy title=”¹”]In fact the biggest drawback I can see is that it might become too effective, thereby rendering the whole idea worthless…[/tippy]
Sum effect: End user happy, charities happy, spammers very very unhappy. O frabjous day!
Is this not genius?
Help me beta it Cowerati!
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¹In fact the biggest drawback I can see is that it might become too effective, thereby rendering the whole idea worthless…
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Yep its a great idea! I saw that idea in a wired mag years ago and wondered why it didn’t take off then… so perhaps its time to re publish the idea and see if it flys this time round?
oh and except for the fact that it would obviously get hacked/spoofed/scammed.
From memory, the system mooted in Wired was different in a few respects: IIRC there was no ‘charity’ component for starters.
This is a fundamental part of my proposed system, because neither end of the chain gets the defaulted money, so there is no vested financial interest from the sender or the receiver.
Also, my proposal would allow advertising and unsolicited mail, which you could accept if you wanted to. In this respect, an advertiser could gamble that you might take the email, but if not, the money is not actually wasted but goes to an approved charitable organization (and maybe the advertiser could even get a tax perk for that). And, importantly, it does not go into some third party entrepreneurial pockets.
As far as hacking/spoofing goes, the likelihood drops significantly because there is a financial component that must be tied to some kind of banking system. There is already a well-trodden path on how that would work – Microsoft’s pay-as-you-mail system relies on it.
cool idea.
and I love the dime-per-chime doorbell
Woud financially ovrburdend spammrs count as a acceptable charity?
I like the idea, but I have one minor suggestion:
The current system of allowing everyone in your address book to pass all spam filters should be retained. Reason being that if my mom wants to send me something, and lord knows paypal is outside of her technological prowess, it should be free from the start.
The system you mention, though, is sound. Maybe it would keep Sister Veronica from bugging me about Greenriver Basin oil shale development
Sheesh. I already gave you 99 cents. How many emails does that buy me?
Sheer genius.
We have a little card at our door which says-
Please ring if an answer is required.
Please knock if an answer is not required.
I swear to God, I’ve seen some folks stand there thinking about it. I’m sure not one in ten knows the reference, so they all just probably think we’re cracked.
Please let this happen soon!
Joey: I have yet to encounter a ‘financially overburdened’ spammer.
Casey: Yes, a major difficulty in implementing this system is with people who are not technically or net minded. I think everyone would soon get to see the benefit of the system though – as more and more people join it, there are slimmer pickings for spammers, which means they’d probably flog harder which means more irritation for people who don’t use the system.
There is no reason you couldn’t White List people, but there would be considerable advantages in having even your ‘trusted’ recipients run through the system. For instance, once a sender is verified on Dime Per Chime, their details are collated in some way – say their email address, ISP and country of origin. Later down the track, if someone spoofs an address, and the system picks up anything at all fishy it simply askes for another transaction & verification. No-one ever loses money over this unless they are not a genuine sender. So it gives you the assurance of continual monitoring of your mail veracity.
I’m not suggesting the implementation would be easy – I suspect it would be a nightmare. But it just depends on how bad spam gets (and the likelihood is VERY bad) and how much of a nuisance it becomes to your everyday punter.
If email starts become entirely useless due to spam, then major alterations will have to be done to the system anyway.
All the big companies want a pay-as-you-mail system. Sure, that would work. But my suggestion is MUCH better.
Consider another thing – if you wanted to, say, do a mail out for an upcoming lecture or exhibition you would have to consider the potential cost. Just like you would with a RW mailout. You would be taking a punt that some people to whom you send an invitation would decline. But some would accept (it costs them nothing) and therefore you save that ‘stamp’. But best of all, you know if anyone does decline, your money is going to a charity.
To clarify – if I sent a mass mailout to 100 people and only 70 accepted, I’d be out of pocket by 30 stamps. It’s a calculated risk. But those 30 stamps would go to a worthy cause. It’s one whole step better than doing a mailout in the real world, where you’d just write off the postage costs as expense. And it would be entirely lost.
A side effect of the system would be that you could also stop people from sending unecessary and stupid emails (like chain letters and stupid Internet ‘wisdom’). Nothing would get those people to drop you from their bulk mailing list faster than losing money over it…
jmf: You’d lose no further money under my system. Unless you keep sending me those annoying horoscopes.
Colonel: I have to confess that I would be one of the 9 out of ten…
But my horoscopes are reliable. I get them from a reliable source.
Hey, I like riding The Mad Cow!
it would put an end to chain letters? where’s the petition? I want to sign up right now…!
jmf: Everything that comes out of the mouth of The Cow is reliable. It’s the News Limited ones that are suss.
Pil: Glad you had fun! There’s plenty of stuff there for a good time when you’re at a loose end (or when the current post is not to your satisfaction!)
nursemyra: Yes – it would kill all kinds of annoying email dead. The Mortein of the internet.
Ah, yes, when seeking a new idea . . . look to the past!
I have one little quibble. It’s one more barrier to the poor; it’s not that they couldn’t scrounge the dime to send an e-mail, but they don’t have credit cards or bank accounts, so how do they even get into the system? You could buy some kind of pre-loaded card with a code or something (like iTunes cards), but there will still be a minimum purchase. Nobody’s going to sell enough for just a few e-mails.
And who’s going to handle the escrow? And how many milliseconds would it take before that company went totally corrupt and started skimming?
I still prefer the SpamAssassin approach. It’s on the server and between my two main (well, four, really) e-mail accounts, it catches about 200 spams a day. Maybe 10 or 20 sneak through. The Google and Yahoo accounts seem to have pretty decent filtering, too.
The other approach would be public executions of spammers, and then their heads could be displayed on pikes up and down the avenue. The might take care of the problem right quick.
Catalyst: Yes – it’s our Prime Minister’s motto. Especially when it comes to Forward Thinking.
Phoebe Fay: It is true that the system penalizes the poor and the technically challlenged. Unfortunately, that same thing can be said of modern society in general.
It’s important to realize that we’re only talking micropayments here, and no money is actually being accrued, so there could be ways around having to have credit card or online accounts. A one-time card idea would work – you buy one for, say, 10c and it could be valid for, say, a year. It would be worthles you buying one if you were a spammer because it would not cover you sending a million emails.
I suggest the escrow is monitored by a board of the charities that take the default proceeds. Sure, they could skim, but they are far less likely to do that than a commercial company.
As for public execution, well, yes, that is my preferred approach. After torture.
after torture? you’re a cruel man reverend.
but you can borrow my instruments