The only promising long-term solution to spam is to begin charging for all received commercial e-mail and make that the industry standard. A quick FAQ on this idea Q1. How does charging solve anything? A1. a) It renders unpaid-for spam mere theft-of-service, criminally prosecutable under current laws. Not immediately, but as the custom of charging matures courts would come to accept that evading payment is simple theft. b) It provides income, at least you'd get paid something for dealing with the problem. c) Some of that income could be used to fund an industry organization to help enforce against abuse. Q2. How can you determine what is commercial and what isn't? A2. It's your system, other than a few possibly illegal motivations you can do anything you want. But more importantly, if the telcos can have residential vs business rates, etc., then so can you. There is nothing that says your lines have to be absolutely perfectly drawn or satisfy everyone. It'd be a lot better than what we have now with minors being flooded with explicit porn spam, obviously fraudulent schemes spewing at everyone, etc. if we could get it mostly under control. "Perfect" might take more time. Q3. Do you mean charging someone like Microsoft for their newsletters? A3. Maybe, the specifics are ultimately up to you, whatever maximizes your profits and keeps your customers happy. Q4. Wouldn't that anger those companies? A4. Maybe, maybe not. If you could reduce commercial mailing to only those who could pay then perhaps it suddenly becomes worth something. Right now I bet many of you delete mail from legitimate companies almost as fast as you delete spam because you have no time for any of it, you're overloaded. Let's state it extremely: How much would it be worth to a major company to know that for the month of September they will be the only commercial advertisement any of your customers would see? No (other?) spam, no nothing, just "``Lord of the Rings: Book 4'' Opens December 32nd" once a day (whatever!), plus their expected, personal mail. Ok, now work backwards to the only ad today, one of only five today, but not one of several hundred today. Marketeers understand that you pay for exclusivity, this concept won't be foreign to them. One reason you can't really sell it now is, in part, because you've let your "product" (i.e., access to your customers' mailbox) become so diluted it's just about worthless. Q5. WAIT A MINUTE YOU'RE ADVOCATING SPAMMING! A5. Not at all. You could opt to not take any commercial email (or any fees for delivering it), that's up to you and your business model. This idea simply tries to make this controllable by those who ultimately have to provide the infrastructure to deliver the mail. You could say I'm advocating turning commercial advertising via e-mail into a legitimate business. But it would be between an ISP and their customers, not some chicken-boner and the open relays. Q5a. What's a "chicken-boner"? A5a. Oh, it's an expression used in the spam community for a particular imagery of a common type of spammer. An anti-social loser in his double-wide, knee-deep in KFC bones, spewing millions of spam msgs for $50 a contract. Q5b. Isn't that kind of an unfair stereotype? What have you got against KFC? A5b. ENOUGH! Ok? It's an expression, a term of art, and spam is really, really a luncheon meat manufactured by Hormel, Inc. Q6. But many of these spammers work off-shore, they'll just keep doing what they're doing. A6. I can't prove otherwise to you. But my assumption is that given a revenue stream for this kind of advertising (i.e., money to spend) enforcement would become more plausible. You can't sue or prosecute some spammer in Korea now because it would be too much expense and trouble, it's lost money. But a well-funded industry association? Perhaps they could pursue evasion internationally. Also, given a revenue stream model, I'd expect int'l ISPs to get involved in this sort of business (where it's legal), so int'l cooperation to prevent theft-of-service would start to become a possibility. Q7. Ok, so why doesn't anyone do this now if it's such a smart idea? A7. Well, to some extent it will take a groundswell of ISPs moving in this direction, no one of them can really do it on their own. For starters we'd have to get the potential advertisers comfortable with the merits of the idea. The real problem is that certain aspects of the net have evolved badly by themselves, so we need to begin pushing back and creating new realities, such as "if you send out commercial e-mail on the net you will have to pay for it". Q8. Pay who? Every ISP? There are thousands of them! A8. There are thousands of magazines, newspapers, etc. Somehow those ad businesses are manageable. Perhaps many (e.g., smaller ISPs) would give their business to the same agency which would set things up and get them paid, I don't know, but it's hardly evidence of unworkability! Given almost any advertising medium there are thousands of outlets. The advertisers have no particular "right" to be able to advertise to every single internet customer for one easy monthly payment. Q9. Won't this annoy customers? A9. Again, whether and under what conditions your customers get commercial advertising email is between you and your customers (it's your business model to chose.) They don't have to get any if you think that's best. But let's be honest: Times have changed. You can't tell me that your customers don't tolerate commercial e-mail because right now they're getting dozens of such messages per day, maybe per hour. The only problem is that you're not being paid so, for example, the cost of those is just being ripped out of your budgets and hence their customer fees. Maybe you could lower prices or add new services given new revenue sources. Or maybe you just fold it in half and put it in your pocket, again that's your business model to pursue. Q10. How would you make this work? A10. One idea is a cryptographically generated "stamp" which could go in the header of anyone's mail who has paid you to receive their commercial e-mail. Beyond the technical solidity, anyone who tries to thwart the method is clearly counterfeiting and defrauding, so again regular business law applies. Obviously there's more to that but it's beyond the scope of a little FAQ like this. Q11. I dunno, it seems so...different...something has to be wrong. A11. That's not much of an objection, or a question. Q12. If this is a FAQ who asked you all these questions? A12. Um, ok, you caught me, I made them up! But I've certainly heard many of the above objections when I've sounded out this idea before and thought it might be helpful to try to deal with the obvious issues up front rather than as a tedious, piecemeal thread. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*