The Hindu Business Line : e-stamping out the spammers

By the time we are done with fighting spam, the power of the Internet to serve as a fast, democratic and worldwide communication medium could be significantly diminished.

With unsolicited e-mail messages accounting for more than half of all e-mail, the issue of spam (unwanted commercial messages) has captured the attention of technology companies, politicians, and the media in the US.

A new US law makes it illegal to send commercial e-mail messages that falsify the sender's address, use deceptive subject lines, or do not provide an "opt-out" method to stop future messages from the sender. Spam filters are already commonplace in the fight against junk e-mail, and more sophisticated spam-blocking technologies are in the works. While these efforts are helpful, they do not address the root of the problem: The economics of junk e-mail is highly favourable to spammers.

A spammer can launch an advertising blitz with minimal investment. All that a spammer needs is a computer, a few Internet accounts, and large e-mail lists that can be purchased cheaply. The ePrivacy Group estimates that the cost of sending a million messages is less than a hundred dollars. A very small response rate — typically, less than a hundred sales from many millions of advertising messages — is sufficient to keep most spammers in business.

Current efforts to fight spam have not changed the fact that the real cost of e-mail messages falls disproportionately on recipients. While each spammer's overhead expenses are very low, companies around the world are spending tens of billions of dollars on additional computing resources to process all the junk e-mail. In addition, it costs US companies an estimated $10 billion a year in lost productivity. The time spent by individual users to sort through large volumes of messages is another way that spam shifts the cost to recipients.

While the anti-spam law is likely to be a deterrent for legitimate businesses based in the US, it is unlikely to limit the activities of fly-by-night operators or spammers based overseas. Tracking down and prosecuting spammers is also a poor use of limited law-enforcement resources. Moreover, as the global information society expands, local laws governing Internet usage will become increasingly ineffective.

Technological solutions are more promising, but spam filters alone may be hard-pressed to do the entire job. Spammers have shown themselves to be quite agile, and some have managed to evade the latest spam-blocking techniques. Besides, spam filters still produce the so-called "false positives", which are valid messages incorrectly identified as spam. Thus, most e-mail users still need to visually check their good messages as well as those identified as spam.

Other techniques focus on verifying the identity of senders in some way. Blacklists operate by blocking messages from domains and Internet service providers that are known to harbour spammers, but they often block messages from legitimate senders who may be using the same ISP.

White lists do the opposite, by positively identifying legitimate senders. They typically include a challenge-response mechanism, which will auto-reply to unfamiliar senders and ask them to answer a simple question or perform a trivial task that either requires a real human response or uses up computing resources — which would be impossible or expensive for mass mailers. The downside is a general slowdown in e-mail communications — including potential deadlocks between two challenge-response systems — and the fact that some senders resent a challenge to their identity.

The most rigorous methods — based on authentication technologies such as digital signatures and certificates — can potentially eliminate spam, but they would also make it difficult or impossible to receive messages from persons not known to a recipient.

By the time we are done with fighting spam, the power of the Internet to serve as a fast, democratic and worldwide communication medium could be significantly diminished.

It is worth remembering at this point the origins of good old "snail mail". An essential part of reforming and simplifying the postal service in the 1830s and the 1840s was to require senders to pay postage in advance. The introduction of standardised, pre-paid postage stamps — first introduced in the British Isles in 1840 and then adopted a few years later in the US — was crucial to the success of the postal service in providing reliable and low-cost communications over long distances.

The e-mail system, which has now become just as important for business and personal communications as the postal system in previous centuries, is certainly in need of similar reform. But the task is complicated by the decentralised architecture of the Internet and its rapid spread throughout the world. Any solution will have to work worldwide, not just in the US, and should be designed to enhance Internet-based communications.

The long-term viability of e-mail may well depend on altering its economics, rather than identifying senders or blocking messages. One possible solution is to require e-mail messages to carry a standard one-cent (or 50 paise) "e-stamp" based on digital certificates. This would put most unscrupulous spammers out of business without any significant economic impact on legitimate businesses and individual e-mail users. It also wouldn't require senders to prove their identity.

Here is one way that standardised, pre-paid `postage' could work in the cyber world: ISPs and other e-mail senders in each country could purchase e-stamps from a designated local authority and attach them to outgoing messages. At the receiving end, e-stamps from incoming messages could be redeemed for a part of their face value.

All of this could happen automatically, behind-the-scenes without inconveniencing e-mail users. E-stamps could become a de facto standard as soon as a sufficient number of large domains, including ISPs, decide to bounce e-mail messages that arrive without postage. ISPs could offer their subscribers a reasonable number of free outgoing messages and set mailing rates for higher volumes.

This would immediately shift the economic burden of e-mail from receivers to senders, while preserving the ability of ordinary e-mail users to communicate inexpensively with others around the world. It would single out and penalise spammers whose outgoing e-mail volumes are disproportionately large compared to the real size of their businesses.

For instance, anyone who wants to send out 10 million e-mail messages would have to pay $100,000. Large businesses that can afford such advertising costs are also most likely to respect opt-out requests and can be prosecuted easily if they violate the law. At the same time, ISPs and other businesses — relieved of the huge financial and logistic burden that spam imposes — would start saving billions of dollars.

Much of the recent public discussion on spam in the US and elsewhere has failed to focus on the economic inequity in today's e-mail system. But there are some hopeful signs. Influential companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo are reportedly looking at e-mail postage as one of the answers to spam, although details are sketchy. Correctly fixing the economic imbalance will ensure an e-mail's viability and preserve its enormous potential as a global communication tool.

(The author works in Silicon Valley's hi-tech industry and writes about the social impacts of technology.)

More Stories on : E-Mail | Insight | Privacy | Internet

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
US and the shifting stand on Libya

Unhealthy prescription

Economy on song... But there are jarring notes too

In the grip of election fever

Defence budget: More power to the arsenal

e-stamping out the spammers

The mystique of marketing

Nuclear transfers

Foreign cigarettes