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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Spam email would likely be reduced 99% if it cost the sender a penny to send each email.

To implement, establish an email header field for a token. The tokens are one-time use, and can be purchased from some token selling authority. The recipient can check with the selling authority if it is valid. If it is missing or invalid, it goes to the junk folder.

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I had read some years ago that putting this "fee" on sending email wouldn't really deter the spammers, when they find one sucker (and they do find them, and there's usually more than one) they can extract so much money out of them that it would still be worthwhile to spend the pennies sending those emails.

so make it a dime.

Indirectly this is already the case.

Domain names and IP addresses aren't free. If we just immediately trash all email which doesn't have valid SPF + DKIM + reverse DNS, we place a small upfront payment requirement on sending email. Domains or IPs can be placed on a blocklist if they still send spam, thus making the domain/IP wasted.

The problem is that waaaay too many legit senders still don't know how to configure their email servers, so you end up with a boatload of false positives.

> The problem is that waaaay too many legit senders still don't know how to configure their email servers, so you end up with a boatload of false positives.

Ironically Gmail has started demanding DKIM or SPF, possibly slowly saving email from this mess of unidentifiable mail.

This thinking is behind the introduction of Proof-of-Work, later popularized through Bitcoin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Problem with this is that it absolutely melts your phone to send a picture while a spammer with a GPU farm can blast out spam in bulk.

Also melts a small operator's mailing list server while the spammer is toasting some IP cameras and insecure IoT without care.

I don't know .. we do have ads on the Internet and these do cost money to run.

Can't you pay less than a penny a user to run ads in Gmail today ?

The idea is fair though I don't think it's far from where we landed with how the large email broker systems operate with the large email system providers.

Would it? Somehow it makes financial sense to mail spam out physically, which I assume costs about that much. Is the conversion rate that much better for physical spam?

Consider I get 2 or 3 spam postal mails a day, and 2 or 3 hundred spam emails. No, my proposal won't eliminate spam. But it would cut it down a lot.

  Your post advocates a
  
  ( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
  
  approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
  
  ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
  (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
  ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
  ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
  ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
  (X) Users of email will not put up with it
  ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
  ( ) The police will not put up with it
  ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
  (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
  (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
  ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
  ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
  
  Specifically, your plan fails to account for
  
  ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
  (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
  ( ) Open relays in foreign countries
  ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
  (X) Asshats
  (X) Jurisdictional problems
  (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
  (X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
  (X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
  ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
  ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
  (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
  ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
  (X) Extreme profitability of spam
  (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
  ( ) Technically illiterate politicians
  ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
  ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
  ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
  ( ) Outlook
  
  and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
  
  (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
  been shown practical
  ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
  ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
  ( ) Blacklists suck
  ( ) Whitelists suck
  ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
  (X) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
  (X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
  ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
  (X) Sending email should be free
  (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
  ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
  ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
  ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
  (X) I don't want the government reading my email
  ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
  
  Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
  
  ( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
  (X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
  ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
  house down!

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