This sounds like a lot of work. A company with competent developers might do this. But most of us are busy with other projects I suspect. If we built this, it would also be tough to harden and debug because you can’t expect everyone to be on the latest version of the spam-system.
Sidenote: Mastodon’s federation works thanks to a group of people who put in a lot of work developing the ActivityPub protocol. I imagine that this spam-system would need a similar protocol.
I would not want to verify myself against some centralized MiaB service, and who will sit in the other end of this verification service? Unpaid volunteers, or maybe employees of some organization we setup to administrate this whole thing. Gathering such data might also create a valuable target to hack.
Like @Bore_God_of_Blunder, I think your enthusiasm is commendable and that your efforts might be better spent elsewhere in the email ecosystem. There might even be projects already trying to do something similar to your idea.
You and others can still explore this idea off course, but I think it’ll have to be proven over time before a project like MiaB, should even begin to consider adopting it. That’s just my opinion.
Yes, but not to the extent that a company with thousands of mailboxes or an email provider with tens, hundreds of thousands or even millions of mailboxes needs.
Also, the fact that you have relatively little spam in your inbox that you can filter yourself is, of course, due to all the security features and anti-spam measures (including the sometimes dubious spam lists of various providers) that have been added to the global email system over the decades. Without them, email would be completely unusable today.
AI will get better over the years, but I agree that it will probably never be perfect.
First of all, I’m pretty sure there are email clients that can be set up to do this, and you could probably also set up an email/groupware server to do this, but I don’t think it’s very practical, especially in a business context where you have a lot of unsolicited messages coming in that are legitimate and need to get into the inboxes of the employees who need to handle them.
But even for a personal email account, I don’t think this is a very practical solution, or do you really want to manually add the sender to your address book before you order something from an online shop, sign up for a newsletter, etc.?
And yes, one part of a possible solution, even for companies, would be to use email only for unimportant messages wherever possible, and to use other communication channels to communicate with their customers, partners, etc., as the majority of people already do for their personal messages, and as communication between employees already works in many companies where apps like Teams, Slack, Mattermost, etc. are used.
However, for unsolicited messages, which would still be necessary for initial contact, I honestly don’t see a solution that could completely replace email, and if there was one, it would almost certainly have a spam problem as well.
Absolutely! Anything with a higher cost (including the time, attention and effort it demands) than its tangible benefit is sure to fail and from my point of view the product of poor design.
Probably, but like I said, I have bigger fish to fry and spam is not my hill to die on.
Neiher would I. I’d also hate for the relentless efforts of spam enablers to drive us to such extremes but it is useful to know we’d have such options if it comes to that.
Elsewhere yes, but not in the email ecosystem.
My one and only objective with starting this discussion was to get a sense within this forum of our collective frustration with the growing number of obvious spam which defeats all we’ve already put in place to filter that out.
They idea was to postpone discussion of implimentation details until we’re sure people are frustrated enough with the current state of affairs to be moved into action for themselves rather than sticking with it being someone else’s problem to solve. But since most people on this forum is at least tech-savvy enough to have found self-hosting email a viable option, it was inevitable that the conversation would be dominated by questions about technical and implementation details at various levels. I’ve accepted that and gave my best answers anyway.
But it may be time to draw a conclusion on the primary objective. Are people frustrated enough with spam and the trends they experience with it to start doing something different than what they did before? It seems not. Not yet anyway, and that too is just fine by me.
On a personal level I’ve implemented a strategy a long time ago which has worked well for myself but isn’t applicable to most email users. As a result my exposure to spam is relatively low meaning that those that do get through intrigue me. When I look at the headers and spam scores it angers me to see how the countermeasures the industry as a whole has managed to put in place is getting nullified blatantly and habitually. So when it happens, and it often does with me, that I notice an opportunity for a solution other might not consider feasible because it depends on tools and techniques they are unfamiliar with, then I consider it my civic duty to at the very least go on record to say hey, guys, we could solve this problem if we wanted to.
That’s what I did. It’s nobody’s fault that collectively we just don’t want to solve problem for ourselves just yet. If the spammers and email ecosystem as it stands manages to keep spam at a tolerable level for most people and administrators then it really isn’t a problem we need to spend energy solving. It’s enough to know that should spamming practitioners spin out of control we’ve got options. I’m happy to leave it at that.
P.S. Another positive outcome is that any spam sympathisers in our midst (if they even exist) were not brazen enough to speak up in defence of spamming and spammers. It’s good to see they (still) prefer to remain unknown. It’ll be real sad when their sense of entitlement outgrows their scruples about it.
What about requiring a fee for a new email sender to pay to be able to send me an email? If I don’t mark it as spam, they get their monies back; otherwise, I keep most of it and a small portion goes to the company providing the micropayments (via a crypto token I presume).
Allow me to auto-approve any sender that Josh has approved already or really-strict-email-org (such as SpamCop) has approved. A portion goes back to them too, if I mark something as spam.
Any legitimate sender has no reason not to pay up for new email addresses; they “know” they will get their monies/tokens back.
Sorry, but that is laughable! It wouldn’t reduce spam, it would help it proliferate by giving spammers a simple way to buy their way past the filters. I’m wondering if this ostensible solution is merely the result of a desperate search for an angle on which to base a new crypto currency or directly motivated by pro-spammer sympathies.
A side-bar on crypto: I’m a huge fan of privacy and permission based solutions, but anonimity and the people who seek to hide behind it will destroy us unless we find ways to stop it. In concept block-chain technology held almost as much promise as the internet itself until crypto-currencies hijacked the concepts to make life easier for criminals to benefit from crime without risk of exposure.
Spam is a problem because it is basically free to send millions of emails. If it cost 1/10th of a penny to pay you to accept the email (and you mark it as spam; so you get to keep the money) then suddenly the cost to send spam is astronomical.
Let’s add more power to you the user; we let you set the price of sending unsolicited email to you. You hate spam, so you set the price to $1.00. Now no unsolicited email is received by your account because, of course, no one is willing to pay that $1.
To make such a system plausible, the use of micropayments is necessary. Obviously credit card charges fails that requirement (due to cost). Crypto-currency becomes the most viable option given is exceptionally low cost to transact.
Make the system easy by using crypto. MiaB integrates Make-SPAM-Pay crypto payments. Email sender tries to send their first email to you. Your MiaB notices that sender is not in your approved list, calls back with requirement to put up escrow, sender’s server puts 20 spammies into your MiaB’s escrow account, gets permission to send email; email sent. You read email and determine it is not spam. The 20 spammies are released back to sender. If you mark as spam, you keep 18 spammies, MiaB gets 1 spammie, and Make_SPAM-Pay gets 1 spammie. [in this example and my previous post, I have assumed each spammie is worth $0.05]
Any time you wish or even automatically via MiaB functionality, you cash out your spammies for fiat currency.
What I think is cooler is that this scheme doesn’t require everyone to be using the system before it can go in effect. MiaB could integrate and start refusing unsolicited email from everyone unless they pay first. Of course, that means you are approving sender email addresses manually beforehand; but small price to pay to “force” others to also adopt the scheme.
Make it even easier to maintain by centralizing the approved email address pairs. Now MiaB just needs to query the service to see if the sending email address and your email address are an approved pair. If not…same scheme as before but all “payments” could be handled internal to the service.
But now you have to trust the service to accurately keep data, not sell you out, and to pay out your fair share.
Or you can have a decentralized permission-less system and just let MiaB manage your approved sender email addresses and use the blockchain to settle the payments; a far smarter use of resources.
And now that you have caused me to write this out…I am going to consider it more. Seems a very easy system to spec out and implement.
And therein lies the rub. Requiring micropayments should’ve been your first clue of something systemic being wrong with this idea. To be effective it must use real money and enough of it to warrant the transaction overhead. We’ve had such a system in the postal system using stamps. It didn’t stop spam, just made it more expensive than sending emails for free. Now you want to bring some combination of postage and selling access to your mailbox back and the real danger becomes that bullshit baffles brains and people fall for the idea. It would only serve spammers and the clearing houses managing everyone’s access prices, not the end user.
Pure fallacy. Crypto hasn’t made anything easier for anyone except for criminals because even through it was complicated for them too they were motivated by their need for anonymity to endure the pain. The traders who turned it into a zero-sum game also didn’t find it easy but they used their ability to come to grips with its complexities as competitive edge so they can get rich off other people’s losses. To the masses that were slated to be the supposed beneficiaries, crypto has just made things impossibly complex.
If we for a moment ignore that what you propose there clashes fundamentally with the entire mechanism of internet mail it almost sounds like a good idea as long as you can do it without Make_SPAM_Pay and others keeping any of the money.
But, if such massive redesign of the email ecosystem is afoot, it would be an even better idea to (re)design it from the ground to rule out any chance of anonymous participation. The solution Mark Shuttleworth sold to VeriSign proves that it’s possible to verify someone’s identity on the internet. When we redesign email we’d use a refined adaptation of those concepts to ensure that nobody gets to participate in sending email unless their identities have been sufficiently well established to guarantee that if they misbehave they can be brought to task. Individuals and business with honest intentions of sending legitimate emails to others would have no reason to even hesitate having their identities verified and already consider themselves as subject to all applicable laws. But if you remove those who cannot afford to be fingered or touched by law enforcement from the email playing field it will no longer be a breeding ground for bad behaviour.
Neither will happen of course. The Internet’s electronic mail protocols and principles will not change in such a fundamental manner, ever. It’s far more likely to stay exactly as polluted with bad intentions and practices as it is today while people continue to migrate the communications that really matter to them elsewhere. Already a massive number of people only use email to enable other modes of communication.
You are going to miss the next financial revolution with this hatred towards crypto.
I do not need to know who is using my Helium IOT antenna; as long as they are paying, they can have at it.
In my example, why can’t the project or company handling the payment scheme keep a portion of the spam escrow (if the email turns out to be spam)? They should be paid for their efforts. Keeps them aligned with our interests in making spammers pay for their evil.
MiaB refuses email today because the sending email server doesn’t correctly match the reverse IP. My previous email server allowed me to write whatever filter I wanted to stop an email. It doesn’t require a complete redesign to refuse said email server because they haven’t put up escrow. And such an approach allows you to decide on your own escrow payment requirement; from zero to infinity. Seems rather inclusive of every email recipient’s own selfish interests; we would get to decide what the cost/value of spam is to us. And as I laid it out, everyone that puts effort into the system gets to earn their piece of the pie; a pie paid for by the unsolicited email senders of the world. And if the unsolicited email sender wants to remain anonymous but finds it worth it to pay our exorbitantly high priced escrow requirements, all the power to them. It would be a fair deal made between two parties; we set the price, they decided if they want to pay it. No need to exchange identities. I suspect though that very rare it will be to find an entity willing to pay if they weren’t damn sure you or I wanted the email they were about to send.
This idea is wrong on so many different levels, I won’t even start commenting on it. But feel free to start a business around such a service, maybe you will get rich with it.
What you do on your own mail server is up to you and nothing stops you from setting up your own filter rules. You could use an allowlist approach and only accept mail from people who have paid you and/or who you know.
I’m genuinely happy to continue to “miss out” on what’s been billed as the next financial revolution for a long time now but simply haven’t been one. All FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) fuelled by counter-culture opposing The Man. Crypto, not having any intrinsic value, required currency traders to obtain liquidity which opened the door to purely speculative trading and before anyone could blink the ratio of speculative trade to legitimate trade became even worse than in the FIAT based forex market, which is saying a lot. The harder the call for decentralised currency grew, the more it became the exact thing the crypto lobby tried to fight against. There was suppose to be a massive move towards people choosing to buy and sell using crypto as opposed to using any central currency, but it didn’t happen. Even mining for crypto, which was meant to provide people with a bona fide opportunity to earn cryptos without directly selling something of value quickly became the domain of the few who dared pay the king’s ransom for hardware in order to be competitive. Like Cisco capitalised on the .bomb era, GPU vendors capitalised on the crypto mining game. Again, the people who were meant to participate, migrate their habits and benefit were left out in the cold until they chose to participate in fear of missing out on the next financial revolution only to lose money hand over fist to those who were better equipped and more motivated make up for their investments and initial losses by sucking newcomers dry. In the end the entire crypto industry has all the characteristics of a massive Ponzi scheme where earlier entrants profit at the expense of new entrants and because there’s actual cost involved as well as greed, the base of new entrants had to grow bigger and bigger all the time, just like in a pyramid scheme. So, yeah, I couldn’t be happier missing out on that type of revolution.
Riddle me this? If crypto is that different from central currencies and out of reach of The Man and his corrupt behaviour, why then are all crypto currencies on all the exchanges values in terms of central currencies like the US dollar?
Even if any of the honourable objectives of the crypto currency revolutionists were met, under the guise of “starting to recognise digital currencies” outplayed the revolutionists and stole the crypto market for their own benefit.
And no, it’s not hatred for crypto you see, but sadness. The entire saga took a golden opportunity and weaponised it against the very people it was capable of benefitting. That loss saddens me, but I consider myself extremely lucky to have noticed very early on that crypto took a wrong turn when it wasn’t the overnight success everyone hoped it would be. I can disapprove of people and their actions without hating them for it. People do what they think will be for their best and that’s not wrong by itself. When their choices and actions willfully impact negatively on others I might be and usually are amonst those who are impacted negatively so it would be fair and proper for me to object to whatever poses a threat to me and mine.
Because on the flipside of that seemingly innocent “paid for ther efforts” in creates yet another convoluted economy waiting to be exploited and turned against those who are supposed to benefit from it. I’m 100% in favour of paying for and getting paid for added value, but the assumption of value must never (again) be built into the structure of any proposed solution. Arrange it so every single person involved works on the principle of earning only honest bucks, i.e. to earn an honest buck you need to acquire something for less than it is worth to you and sell it for less than it is worth to the next person in the chain. By fixing the price up front you are relying on a valuation of added value that has neither been proven yet nor can it adjust to actual value experienced by users along the way. Of course you’d be right to ask “without the assurances of how much they’d stand to earn who in their right mind would invest in the infrastructure to run such a service?” The answer is “hopefully none of the current crop of greedy investors” and that way we can keep those out of the game. The business should go to someone who is focussed purely on offering sufficient palpable value that people will insist on paying for it in order to ensure long term viability. Being willing to take on that business without a preconceived profit margin such as suggested by setting a per-spam transaction cost is an easy way to seperate greed from value. I’m not saying anyone should work for free, but it would attrack all the wrong participants if we commit to paying for something we’ve not yet experienced as adding value.
Fine in principle, but not realistic if the earnings are preset rather than based on how effective everyone’s efforts add value to those who pay.
Also, for most participants that effort would detract from their core business so they’d either not give it the attention it requires or they’d be wisely unwilling to even participate. That would leave the door open for some try “harvest” the little bits all the earnings left on the table by those small or reluctant players. Before long they run the show and all the checks and balances for keeping costs relative to perceived value are thrown out and we’re back to square one.
“We” don’t exist (yet) in that equation. There can be no fair deal made between two parties if one party doesn’t exist. Consequently “we” will become someone pretending to speak on our behalf, but it will be thinly veiled pretence. If such an arrangement (i.e. any system of governance involving representatives whether elected, appointed or inherited) actually represented the best interests of people we’d not be having this conversation anymore because that system would long have addressed all forms of exploitative behaviour a long time ago. It’s valid to dream of “we” deciding, but only once “we” have the means to think and act as one. I’d rather spend my energy making that a reality than anything else.
Yeah, still somebody had to call it out for the crap that it is. You’re welcome. It could of cource be argued that it would have been even more fittingly cruel to let our silence on the matter convince Keith to invest in such a business. But for one I am not that cruel and secondly if we’ve learned anything from crypto it’s to never underestimate people’s desperation to recover from their bad investments by any means neccessary. Bullshit baffles brains.
If your own post office mailbox had a requirement for any unsolicited catalog to pay the post office $5 (over and above the cost of sending it) to put the catalog in your mailbox and if after you received it you got to determine if it was a waste (spam) and keep $4.98 of that five dollars and the post office kept the remaining $0.02 but if you liked the catalog the $5 was sent back to the catalog company, you are telling me that you don’t think that the number of unsolicited catalogs in your mailbox would decrease significantly as a result?
I would argue that you would likely never receive an unsolicited catalog ever again. Unless of course they knew enough about you that the catalog company was absolutely certain you would like the catalog.
You asked for ideas on how to stop spam at our email servers. I don’t see why such an approach wouldn’t work. And under this model, if spam actually gets through to your mailbox you aren’t unhappy about it because you got paid for it. And in fact you got paid exactly what you wanted to be paid to accept the spam. Fair deal.
Wouldn’t that be the outcome of this?
Right now they can send it to you for very little and play the odds that you just might buy from it. Obviously those odds are in their favor or else they wouldn’t be sending out millions of catalogs every year.
Increase the cost of sending unsolicited catalogs to an amount above those odds and they stop sending them.
They would then only send them to people that ask for them.
I didn’t ask for ideas. I asked (the forum) to express their level of frustration with spam in order to gauge if they (the MiaB community) would be sufficiently motivated to take concerted action against spam. They’re not. I’ve asked people to ignore implementation details and simply assume something effective can be done. That didn’t work because too many participants are technically inclined so they can only consider a solution they can see working, so I had to entertain some technical discussions. That didn’t change the fact that overall the motivation is lacking.
But thanks for trying to sell my/us your idea. Like it said, if it could work without crypto, without predetermined payments per mail going to some agency, and without having to rearrange the whole email protocol to accomodate the brokerage of the tolls you propose, it’d been something to consider. But it’s technocracy and nothing else. I’ve seen too much of that in my life. Technocracy boils down to having solutions waiting for a problem, like in “to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.” You’re invested in crypto, whether physically (bought the kit), intellectually (went through the pain to understand how it works) or ideologically (bought into the hype of what it can achieve to beat oppression), makes no difference. So now you’re on the lookout for anything that would require crypto because it could help you make a return on your investment. No matter if it’s a good or bad idea. No matter if the overall effect will be positive or negative. No matter anything other than your own personal opportunity to profit. That’s OK, you do you, you chase whatever opportunities you see and make your money. As long as you don’t intend taking money from me where I don’t agree that the value I get in return warrants it or harm me and by extension others in the process, you can do as you please. But do not expect me to lie to you, or to help you hurt yourself, or to condone something I am able to see will cause more harm than good to myself and or others.
I’ve nothing against you and would never try to discourage you from coming up with a brilliant solution and making the most of it for your own benefit and those you care about. Viable solutions and even good ideas do not occur in isolation. They stream forth like mighty rivers. Be very aware of this whenever you find yourself needing to defend a solution or an idea. If you’re truly a source of candidate solutions and ideas your primary job is to spin through those that aren’t up to scratch as fast as possible. Defending an idea that’s already reasonably been called into question is not only a waste of time but also what will keep you from moving onto other potentially better ideas that will solve a bigger portion of the problem so eventually you can find the one that solves all the problems without unintended consequences. If you find that ideas are in limited supply you’d be tempted to engage irrational logic to defend the ones you have, and those should get culled off even faster because to actually make an original idea, even one that seemed to check all the boxes, work in real life will require a great many additional ideas and solutions. Either to solve smaller parts of the problem you didn’t foresee or to improve on the original idea when reality does its inevitable thing where it ruins your great idea.
Botttom line, if you have what it takes to come up with game changing concepts you’d know to discard most of your ideas and only keep that .001% that serves you at any given point in the project for as long as they serve you. If that’s not you, if you tend to have a few good ideas here and there, if you tend to rather defend an idea rather than adapt or replace it, then the kindest piece of advice I can offer you is not to dream of being the one to disrupt entire markets or save the world from itself.
Exactly. If after all the trouble of setting up the currency, brokers, protocols, integration with email packages, marketing and maintenance arrangements we end up with the same outcome, can you honestly claim that it was all done to impeove people’s lives or would you concede that the only people who’d benefit from it would be you (as the broker) and the spammers who can now buy their way into people’s mailboxes.
A company with competent developers might do this. But most of us are busy with other projects I suspect. If we built this, it would also be tough to harden and debug because you can’t expect everyone to be on the latest version of the spam-system.
