There is quite a bit less agreement about how to solve this but one popular idea seems to be to make e-mail cost money. The reasoning behind it is simple, if it costs money then the incentive to send out milions of messages will be gone, it will no longer be free to do.
There are two major problems with this reasoning:
- When sending out huge amounts of mail, you either have to get a new Internet account every few days due to your ISP banning you, or you pay a substantial fee for a business account, bandwidth and the fact that your ISP doesn't cave in at the first complaint. This all makes it cost money already, and the price is related already to the amount of spam being sent.
- It removes one of the two major advantages of e-mail, the fact that for the casual user, it is FREE to use.
It also seems rather obvious to me that those who propose the 'fee' solution have never really looked at how e-mail works and why spamming is as easy and happens as often as it does. They just see that it makes people money, and go for what seems obvious, take away the ability to make money.
The alternative is to have people deposit a bond before being able to send e-mail, and only deduct from it when it turns out you are sending spam mail..
This solution is a little bit better, it doesn't impose direct cost on the use of e-mail, but it still does have some major troubles.
First of all, there is a huge potential for conflicts about the bond, people who will claim to have received spam, and senders arguing it was not spam, and fighting it in court. Far fetched? I don't see it happen too easily in Europe, but I definitely see it happen in the USA.
Second, who are we going to trust to hold the bonds for all those e-mail users? Besides the fact that there is simply not a single organisation in the world that I'd trust in such a thing, this will also make for a superb target for those who don't care that much about the law and are after the money.
At any rate, introduction of such a system will have a simple result, people will set up an alternative e-mail system. THat may in the end solve the entire problem, but at the price of no longer having a mail system that sortof works between any given two internet users regardless of where they are and what kind of system they use.
Now, untill the day that Windows and MacOS come with such a new mail system installed by default, we can just forget that the majority of people are going to use it.
So, there is no solution then you ask?
I am not saying there is no solution, I am however saying that the
proposed solutions of either introducing a fee or a bond are not
going to solve the issue without making e-mail a lot less attractive
and usable for normal purposes at the same time.
To find a more proper solution, we'll have to look at the underlying problems and causes first.
The first problem with e-mail is that everyone can claim to be you
(or anyone else in the world) when sending mail.
This is a rather big problem, and one with consequences way beyond
the problem of spam also. TO mention just two of those, it is used
a lot by mail borne computer virusses, and it makes fraud and so called
phishing (trying to get information from people by posing as some
official of an organisation they deal with) a lot easier.
This also happens to make the proposed bonded sender/fee solutions
very impractical.
The second problem is that e-mail is being used for lots of things that were not taken into account when the system was created, and all those things have been made possible by 'hacking' the e-mail system. This resulted in a 'ducttape' solution, and also results in e-mail being very easy to abuse for things like spam.
So, what I propose is to make some fundamental changes to the e-mail system, and do that primarely at the mail servers, and don't bother the end-user with it too much.
Such a new system should at the very least address the following issues on top of what current e-mail does:
- Authenticated sender
- Methods for including non text material and standarized formats for non text materials
- Extendability built into the protocol. We do not know today what we will be using e-mail for tomorrow and how, and make it impossible to hide what type of information is being sent in a mail.
This is needed, not just to do something about spam but in order to ensure e-mail becomes more usable and stays more usable then it is now.
Next time I'll talk about how I exactly think this can be done.