We need an email tax | Hacker News Reader

We need an email tax

prospect-magazine.co.uk

6 pointsrobg8 comments

Time for the form letter!

Your post advocates a

( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) 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 (X) 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 (X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) 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 (X) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) 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 ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) 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 (X) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (X) Sending email should be free ( ) 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 ( ) 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:

(X) 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!

NO. The poster is an idiot, but there is no excuse for using that thoughtless form letter.

I hold precisely the opposite opinion. (How's that for HN-sanctioned "YOU'RE WRONG!"?)

The poster is doubtful "an idiot" for posting something that is a serious attempt at solving spam. Sure the idea won't work, but if coming up with a successful solution to fighting absolutely every spam message was so simple we would already have been solved, no?

Secondly, the form letter offers a terse list of not only the pitfalls of this particular approach, but a checklist of other things to consider when responding with "well ok what if I change $something?".

Thirdly, it's a subtle nudge saying "lots of people have already thought about this stuff, why not have a looksee at other work in the area and learn from people that have gone before you", without calling them out and getting all nasty.

Finally, levity isn't a misfeature.

Good day, ( ) sir / ( ) ma'am.

Uninformed? Apparently. Ridiculous? Yes. But nonetheless, these ideas are dangerous because they may sound plausible to internet-printing politicians.

Also, a tax on email would mean that using an unlicensed mail server in a foreign country is tax evasion which must be banned.

How does this interact with the expectation that much spam is sent from networks of zombies? The "From" field is missing or wrong. Who gets taxed?

Seems to me the author doesn't actually know how spam these days is being generated.

Perhaps it's cynical of me, but the real intent of a tax like this would be to fill the public purse. "Reducing spam" would just be a flimsy excuse to get the tax passed.

Wow, talk about missing the point... "A penny charge for every email would stop spam, and fill the empty public purse" Email is just a damn protocol, charge for it and people will use something else. Information is free, get used to it.

I strongly agree that email should be taxed. However... 3c per email is a bit steep! The price should be just enough to upset the spammers' ROI calculation. If, on average, 1 in 100,000 spam messages results in an average $50 sale, the email tax needn't exceed $50 per 100,000 messages sent. That comes out to 0.0005c per message, which leaves plenty of change for that large caramel macchiato.

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