There’s been a debate brewing for a while in the email industry over whether a tax, stamp or other burden should be placed on email senders for every outbound email to force a quid pro quo relationship with ISPs and their recipients. The impetus here is that if you have to pay (either in computation time or fiscal penalty), it will cause spammers to pull the reigns on mail they send potentially putting many out of business and force mass mailers to rethink their marketing strategies - moving from a blanketed and broad targeting practice to a more targeted practice. The folks in the direct marketing world have been under this sort of pressure since the US post office began charging for mail delivery and is why your postal inbox isn’t crammed to the hilt with unwanted mail every day (usually). You can read more about the general idea here.
Yahoo! announced a few days ago that it, too, is reviewing the potential for charging a 1¢ fee for every email that hits its servers and an absence of this electronic stamp would mean a high propensity the mail would never be delivered or seen by the intended recipient. ABC covered the story here. And it appears that Yahoo! would be partnering up with a firm called CentMail.
Currently, there are several programs you can use to have your email “accredited” by paying a fee to a partner vendor of Yahoo!, but this only assures your mail will receive a bump in likelihood of making it to the inbox. The new proposal would actually charge everyone sending mail, regardless of affiliation, a penny who wanted their mail to not be hosed by Yahoo! filters. Slight subtly here, too. The money from the pennies collected would go to charity whereas now the money for the accredited services goes to that company’s coffers.
The meat of the debate is:
- Will this work? It’s been tried before and shot down. The very principals the internet was founded upon are free access and sharing of knowledge. Will the bad actors out there continue to ruin it for us or are we willing to pay to have our emails delivered to deter the spam that ISPs are having to deal with?
- Will this become a precedent? Or will we have to manage a payment account with Yahoo! for those emails sent there and other ISP’s will still be free to send to? Or, worse case, if this takes off, will we have to have a payment account with every ISP we send to? I’m already getting a headache thinking about that one.
- Would this be overruled by a court? We pay the US Post Office (notice the US part - it’s federally regulated) for their man power, gas, relay expenses, etc. But, is one penny an acceptable charge for the ISP to pass along for deterrence of abusing its technological infrastructure? What happens if they have a bad year and either redirect the money from charity back inwards or make arbitrary changes in the cost of sending an email?
- How will this affect email deliverability? Will anything not stamped be immediately thrown away?
I am not a strong supporter of either method since I see the pros and cons. We don’t live in a society where trust alone will suffice and we’ve seen this play out. How many people have given away their hard earned money to rich Nigerian royalty just needing a bank account to stash their cash in? But, I also believe that what makes the internet wonderful and innovative is the leveling effect it has with anyone who can get online which transcends socioeconomic, racial and cultural barriers.
I believe if Yahoo! could implement something like this in a well thought out manner (good UX - user experience), keep the money collected going to a good cause and build confidence that it won’t be used as a system for monetary gain, I’d be very interested in knowing how a test would turn out. I’ve signed up for CentMail and will be testing if and when it’s released. In the meantime, you can rest assured Bronto will be involved in these discussions and on the front lines of compliancy.
And if you find yourself really interested in learning more, here’s a whitepaper on the topic from Yahoo! describing their theory in more detail.
Please share your thoughts on this. It’s a good juicy topic!
Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability at Bronto
@ChrisAWheeler
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I guess Yahoo! seems to think spammer have no money. Which is odd, because I’m pretty sure it’s a multi-million dollar industry, and some of the pirate data centres are actually pretty well run.
1c isn’t going to stop anyone.
@Jake - But, if bot net infected machines are being tagged as the last sender in the hop to Yahoo, they’ll either get stuck with the bill (coming out of their bucket if it’s by from address) or won’t pay resulting in non-delivery. I do think this will be a deterant to spammers especially given the billions of spam messages they send. $.01 can add up at those levels.
I just wonder how many real people would get caught in this as well and be stuck paying for mail they normally legitimately sent previously without having to pay. They’d be punished for the impact spammers have caused.
I keep seeing “identity” as the key factor here. Though this is a waaay oversimplified solution for Email Stamps working, what about 1 cent for email from addresses not on a personal “safe senders” list? Thus you could email for free those you know and love, while other email addresses would have to pay 1 cent.
Something like that…
@Chris - Thanks for posting this article on your blog over at TheEmailGuide.com!
Your idea would certainly cut risk back on those you know personally. But, as with any receiver and the safe sender list/address book idea, how do you get on it to begin with? If I’m emailing someone and I’m not on their safe list, it won’t get to them to allow them to add me in the first place, regardless of how important my email may be for them - esp, if it’s filtered out beforehand for not having a $.01 estamp affixed.
Hi, all:
Just to clarify for those of you jumping to conclusions that research projects necessarily lead to production solutions, at Yahoo! we’re always looking for new and innovative ways to help protect Internet users from spam. Some of our solutions are pure technology, but we don’t expect to solve everything with faster computers and more machine learning. Social science, economics, user education, collaboration with ISPs and senders… all of these are fair game in our mission.
Hope that helps,
/m
Mark Risher
Spam Czar, Yahoo! Mail
I am not a fan of the micro payment system, and in this case, I just cannot see it as being feasible. In order for this to work, a combination of things would have to happen … the SMTP protocol would need to be modified, or “patched,” or worse yet, replaced with a new Mail RFC. This would mean that ever mail system (server and client) would need to be patched to adhere to the new standard. Not only is the coding of such a huge effort, but so is the installation of that updated software. It might be hard to explain to grandma why her email no longer works because Outlook 97 is no long compliant.
Then you have the actual issue of collections. What about small hosting services, does this mean that under the cent per message format that they will need to have some sort of an account to send and receive email? Like SOX regulations, many smaller companies may not be able to afford the overhead of such a system.
But that also means, that whenever that small ISP receives an eail, it will also need to collect a fee before delivering the mail? (or during deliver, if the RFC is altered such to handle it). And if a spammer does pay the cent, are they obligated to deliver the email, even if their spam filtering deems it as “spam?”
Granted, a cent is trivial for most of us here in the US, but what about internationally? There are much poorer nations, and that cent equivalent in other local currencies may not be as trivial to them, and what about exchange rate fees for those 10 pesos that my friend in Mexico just sent me?
I understand the logic behind the cent per message, but I just cannot see this working. The genie, as they say is already out of the bottle, and it will take a lot of effort to get it back in.
By using blacklist, greylist, whitelist and bayesian techniques, only about 1 out of every 80 spam attempts actually makes it to my inbox.
In the future I can see things like email signing being used, and then applying those same techniques (blacklists, whilelists, etc) to the signatures. That will prevent the “whack-a-mole” game that currently goes on between spammers and everyone else. Well, reduce. Someone will always find a way around the system, even the cent per message scheme, to try and get their spam through.