Sending newsletters should cost something

[jonwest]

It seems like the point of this is to reduce junk mail by forcing a financial cost to sending mail thereby causing the sender to really consider the content of their message before sending it—except there is a real cost associated with sending traditional mail and there is still a huge amount of garbage traditional mail sent out every day.

Maybe I’m missing the point, though?

[ghaff]

No. And I've heard proposals like this going back at least a couple of decades. The theory goes that if you make email expensive (at scale) charging even a trivial fee will make shotgun blasts cost prohibitive. While (very much in theory), a few cents won't deter the casual emailer. Though more likely, as with SMS at one point, people would find ways to route around the expensive pipe because bits are bits at the end of the day.

[chrisco255]

But mail is always priced at a fixed rate. What if your inbox worked on a bonding curve, such that as it filled up it became more expensive to send to (except for whitelisted addresses you approve)? What if your inbox required that the sender owned a particular NFT (proof of membership in a community)?

I mean there are infinite rules to play with in that sense. That's what excites me about crypto.

[qqii]

At the moment the cost of sending mail doesn't scale with the amount of mail you send. After spinning up a mail server the difference in cost between sending 1,000 and 10,000 emails is trivial.

[boplicity]

> forcing a financial cost to sending mail

By doing this, you'll encourage the commercialization of email. The people who can fund sending email will be the ones who send email.

Frankly, I don't think email is broken, as is. It is very easy to subscribe and unsubscribe to email lists, and spam filtering generally works. It is relatively easy to control one's inbox, and it is completely under your control, as opposed to the many other services that have tried to replace it.

[daniel-cussen]

There is really not that much junk mail in the traditional mail, in my experience. Probably it varies place to place, but it's much MUCH less than what I get in my gmail.

[teitoklien]

Not sure if its a good idea,

Email servers get hacked daily, If you’re auto-sending payment to receiver , now there is an incentive for hackers , to spam themselves with your inbox and you pay out of your wallet for that.

Now, yes one could say, that’s no problem just have a multi-wallet approval method , so unless the second one approves, it wont. But now that makes it a bit more complex, especially for newsletters where multiple recipients can be there.

Also, i just think overall Paying to send emails is lame... It sounds all cool and dandy, until it isn’t..

Getting spammed with newsletters from a writer ? Unsubscribe (and if they still continue , mark as spam)

Having to pay to send newsletters, now just adds an extra step for new newsletter authors to fight against fraud , and constantly calculate if its worth it to send emails to a person, and when they’ll stop sending because of that. Pretty sure the receiver, wouldn’t be that much happy.

Nice idea though, Who knows, a refined version of it might make sense.

[burnished]

A sibling comment thread makes the observation that proof of work with variable volumes of work set for different groups could be a good system. Like setting the work needed for your newsletter to 0, and complete unknowns take two minutes of CPU time, that sort of thing.

[daniel-cussen]

Well in the mail you have to pay for the stamp. It's about a dollar. You could charge 10 cents...in fact, that's not a bad idea for a cryptocurrency.

[csomar]

The money (probably crypto dust) should be burned instead of sent to the receiver. There should be just a proof of payment (or proof of burn). Could also be replaced with a proof of work for some hashing that the computer do.

[Fnoord]

Bill Gates proposed sending email costs money. I remember this list from the 00's which included all kind of failed proposals to combat spam.

Newsletters are no issue in EU though. They need to provide a clear and easy way to unsubscribe or they break the law.

[dangerface]

I still get newsletters I never signed up for tho. They are breaking the law but it's profitable for them to do so.

[dragonmost]

Legitimate emails aren't the issue here, you'll keep receiving junk from outside EU or from senders that don't comply

[snowwrestler]

This is probably the list you remember. It got used a lot more before spam filters actually got good enough to protect most inboxes (a development that I think is way under-appreciated today). Clever people on message boards spent a lot more time trying to think up new ways to beat spam than they do now.

Edit - now with good ol' ASCI formatting.

—————————-

  Your post advocates a

  ( ) technical
  ( ) 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
  ( ) 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
  ( ) 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
  ( ) 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
  ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

  Specifically, your plan fails to account for

  ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
  ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
  ( ) Open relays in foreign countries
  ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
  ( ) Asshats
  ( ) Jurisdictional problems
  ( ) 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
  ( ) 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:

  ( ) 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
  ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
  ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
  ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
  ( ) 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:

  ( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
  ( ) 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!

[graeme]

You don’t get spam from non eu countries?

[zivkovicp]

...or you could just mark your spam as such and block the sender to reduce future junk mail without ruining a nice system of essentially free global communication for everyone who uses it as such.

[BenjiWiebe]

The sender is different for almost every email though. Sometimes one sender will be used 3-4 times but that's about the max.

[jerf]

The weirdest thing about this proposal to me is that it picks the use case where the proposal is backwards. If someone is receiving a valuable newsletter they actually want to receive, the recipient ought to be paying for it. Senders would need to be paying for emails that people don't want.

If newsletter senders are paying to send out they're going to have to then have some sort of separate charging mechanism from the recipients to get them to compensate the sender.

[mrlemke]

I was thinking about this too. If I had valuable information, why would I pay you to give it to you? This deincentivizes the free sharing of knowledge through email. Most people will opt for cheaper and more efficient communications methods for noncommercial communication. When that happens, the spammers will follow anyways.

[sneak]

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000

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

[qqii]

Yes, this is a very old idea that resurfaced when javascript based crypto miners as an alternative to advertising became infamous.

[fanf2]

If you are planning a proof-of-work system for email, you need to address the issues in this paper: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork2.pdf

And since blockchains are public, you need to address anonymity and communications tracking (what the spooks call metadata): public keys are pseudonyms and there has been a lot of successful research on decloaking “anonymized” data.

[phkahler]

You just need a handshake where the receiver sets the level of work required. Now you can whitelist people. You can also provide modest levels of work for "more reputable" email addresses, and set the default high for everyone else.

Done.

[rmhsilva]

This is great, thanks for the link. Love how it was written in 2004.

[qsort]

I don't understand what problem is this system trying to solve, it just seems overcomplicated to me.

> there should be economic incentive to only communicate valuable information. Sending an e-mail should cost "something".

Why wouldn't this be solved by attaching a simple POW to every message? The trust thing is a non-issue, you'd just whitelist people or domains you trust.

[Igelau]

It's solving the problem of "what else haven't we tried to screw up yet by adding a Blockchain?"

[EGreg]

“How does one earn reputation? By sending emails which are not marked as spam.”

So I just do a sybil attack of sending messages to accounts I control, and not marking them as spam? Avoiding Sybil attacks ain’t so easy when you’re building a peer to peer and permissionless system.

Oh and it gets better… this reputation can then be milked for all kinds of things:

”In a system where we want to incorporate some kind of reputation system, after reading the message, the recipient could publish an acknowledgement on the chain with an indication of how valuable the information was. This could be as simple as yes/no/abstain. There would probably need to be rules here to prevent gaming the system. For example, the weight of the acknlowedgement could decrease over time. The pricing mechanism could then be based on your reputation.

The reputation would be stored in a token, and a set of smart contracts would goven their behaviour.

Reputation could be fungible (ie if I have 10 reputation, I can "endorse" someone else up to 10-N reputation, N tbd, for example - there could be other endorsement rules). This could permit anyone to create multiple pseudonyms which, with some ZKP magic, all "share" their reputation, but cannot be linked. This could even work across networks.”

So basically, the whole system would be built on “reputation” credits that are easily obtainable by creating lots of fake identities, to “mint” reputation tokens by colluding.

[remram]

Great, another cost to making free software. As if building installers for difficult platforms and moving targets (macOS) and dealing with antivirus software (code signing certs cost $$) wasn't enough, now charge me for sending a newsletter. Everyone is a company, right?

Edit, having read the article: If you're going to put that much cryptography into it, why not give a unique key when you subscribe? That way you can unsubscribe or reduce volume at any point, by dropping messages with that key (and all messages without keys). As usual, what is the extra blockchain for?

[hamlsandwich]

This proposal seems to make the assumption that senders need their incentives adjusted - you need to pay some amount to send someone a message.

I can't see anything that stops a perverse incentive being created on the recipient's part: Why wouldn't I create a harvesting mailbox which signs up for as many messages as it can to generate income?

It seems like there would need to be a feedback mechanism so that senders could tell who was actually a recipient worth paying to talk to.

[jedberg]

Almost every proposal for micro transactions for email involve the sender bearing the cost only if they don't want the email. This proposal would make everyone have to pay.

I like the idea of using the blockchain to handle the micro transactions, but I'd rather only have the money put in escrow until the reader opens it and either accepts or rejects it (or it goes back to the sender after 10 days or something).

[upofadown]

You could eliminate a lot of complexity by first checking if the email itself is signed. If it is from someone you know then you are done. If it is not from someone you know (i.e. anonymous) you would then kick in some sort of external reputation system ... or not even bother, just add a bunch of spam points.

I think that sometimes we forget that we are almost always sending and receiving anonymous emails and how weird that is.

[gwbas1c]

Honestly, I just want email, phone, ect, to only allow contacts from whitelists. (Kind of like how Facebook Messenger works.)

[D13Fd]

This seems like just another attempt to shoehorn blockchain into a system where it has no place and offers few advantages. Plus, I very highly doubt that a system that charges users to send e-mail would see much adoption.

All of this is offered to solve a problem that a user can solve by right click->mark as junk in most e-mail clients.

[EricE]

>Plus, I very highly doubt that a system that charges users to send e-mail would see much adoption.

Yup - I'm certainly not going to volunteer to pay more :p Spam filtering. It's not perfect but it is effective. I agree wholeheartedly with this being just another excuse to insert the pet technology of the day - which to day is Blockchain.

Blockchain Blockchain Blockchain!

[cyptus]

hashcash headers (proof-of-work) for spam protection looks really interesting but is not really used in the wild: https://security.stackexchange.com/a/118182/202065

[gego]

...while we're at it, if we are taxing senders why not also finally put a cost on metadata and user data e.g. by a fee that gets sent to a copyright collective... "little" basic income there we go ;)

[tomcooks]

Why make it expensive? So that only gigacoros can send newsletters?

Just don't sign up to mailing lists you don't like, or learn how to use temp email addresses and/or email+filter variables

[pc86]

It does. You have to pay for a provider. Best case scenario it takes a long time to organically grow a list. Or you're paying for ads to build it.

[chadlavi]

This would just mean that no one does hobby newsletters, and all the newsletters are simply spammers/marketers trying to make money off of you.

Adding more capitalism is not how to solve problems caused by capitalism.

[balozi]

The dig at capitalism is a bit puzzling since this may be the perfect setting to demonstrate the principles of capitalism. Let them deploy their capital and see how market responds. Their theory is that "sending an e-mail should cost something". Maybe that cost is $2.30 per message, and maybe its $0.0000000023 per message. Either way its their capital at stake.

[erellsworth]

Maybe I'm missing something, but why would any senders adopt this?

[tomcam]

Can’t wait for the author to invest in this idea!

[Cryptonic]

Good idea. I think email should be save and participant-transparent. This would also avoid a lot of scam and phishing.