http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/printer.jsp?CID=1051-080802A
>Mail Me the Money!
>By David Friedman 08/08/2002
David is a very bright fellow. But this time he's
several years behind. The idea of using epostage
to stop spam has been discussed quite a bit. The
problem is how to get over the adoption hump.
Until most people are taking one form of epostage,
most people don't have enough incentive to download
and install something that allows them to pay it.
Until most people are set up to pay it, any form of
epostage I require closes my mailbox to unknown
senders from whom I want to receive mail. And even
from known senders. Giving someone my email address
doesn't automatically put them in my white list.
Hashcash tries to lower the adoption barrier by
removing the need to pay money for epostage.
Instead, the sender burns processing time on his
computer, answering a cryptographically hard
challenge. But even this requires set-up. There is
inadequate incentive to do so until there is a
standard mechanism, but no standard mechanism is
born until a significant fraction of the market
has taken that first step. It may take government
action, to institute an effective epostage
standard!
I think the better idea is to require that people
off your white list "hand sign" email to you. A
couple of companies are now trying to implement
this. An email sender, if not on your white list,
must respond to a verification email or go to a
website, by a process that is very simply for a
human sender, but difficult for a spammer to
automate. Where epostage requires a standard
mechanism, a variety of mechanisms for "hand
signing" would frustrate spammers while making it
no more difficult for legitimate senders. I'm
hoping Eudora and some of the other big mail
clients incorporate this kind of feature. The
advantage to putting this in the mail client is
that the required "hand sign" can be personalized:
"Your attempt to email David Friedman is
blocked until you fill in the blank: The
Incredible ______ Machine."
It will be a long time before spammers have a
process that defeats millions of personal
challenges. On the other hand, I have a hack in
mind that would work a large percentage of the
time. But I'm not telling. If spammers did figure
out such hacks, people would then improve their
challenges. Yeah, this would lead to another
arms race, and spam would leak through to the
unwitting. But this arms race is one that helps
spammers identify and target the part of the
population whose challenges are sub-par, which
is their natural prey. People like David aren't
in the market for herbal Viagra or back alley
debt consolidation.
Since David is an anarchist, I'm surprised he
didn't point out that spam is the result of
government. The government is ineffective at
preventing spam, but it DOES prevent individuals
and ISPs from taking retribution against spammers.
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