Yahoo researchers think spam filters could trust an Honest

Abe e-mail, while charities could get penny-rich in the experimental CentMail program.

Yahoo’s researchers want you to voluntarily slap a one-cent stamp on your outgoing e-mails, with proceeds going to charity, in a bid to cut down on spam. Can doing good really do away with spam, which consumes 33 terawatt hours of electricity every year, not to mention way too much of our time?

The idea behind CentMail is that paying to send e-mail — even a single cent — differentiates a real e-mail from spam blasts, and thus, spam filters can be adjusted to let the stamped mail sail right through, according to a report from New Scientist. Users would get to choose which charity benefits from their penny missives, which the researchers hope will convince people to pay CentMail for something that’s currently free.

Anti-spam companies estimate that spam comprises more than 90 percent of e-mail, a situation explained, in part, by the lack of real expense in sending e-mails. The idea is to create a class of certified e-mail which will allow spam filters to concentrate on, well, messages touting “Rolexes”, Viagra and very cheap copies of expensive software.

Users would pre-pay, and then a stamp would be automatically added to each outgoing e-mail (presumably, no licking is necessary) and the proceeds would go to the approved charity of the user’s choice. Centmail is currently in a private beta, but you can add your e-mail address (for free!) to be notified when it launches.

This is not the first attempt to add certification and/or money to the e-mail environment to cut down on spam. Microsoft has its own research project, while AOL’s Goodmail successfully offers anti-spam protection to large marketers.

But perhaps the most widespread authentication solution is the Sender Policy Framework, which helps prevent spammers from pretending to send e-mails from a company’s domain name — but is largely invisible to every day users, even if, as customers of services such as Gmail, they use it every day.

It’s also not clear how the system will prevent spammers from sticking stamp codes in their e-mails to pretend they paid the tax. That same problem doomed a company called Habeas, which in 2004 offered legitimate users a copyrighted haiku to stick in their e-mail headers, with the threat to use the heavy penalties of copyright law to crack down on abusers.

That didn’t stop the spammers.

It’s not clear how much the proposal would help, however, since so much of the spam is now sent using botnets, which are networks of zombie PCs whose owners have no idea their computers are part of a massive spamming organization.

Considering how much legitimate e-mail ends up in the “dead letter office” of today’s spam filters, consumers’ tendency to prefer free stuff, and the vastness of the spam problem, perhaps this is better thought of as anti-anti-spam filter protection for real people, rather than as a true anti-spam solution.

Update August 17: The story was corrected to say that spam wastes up 33 terrawatt hours per year, not 33 terrawatts per year. As reader CB explains, “Watts give you energy per time already so it doesn’t make sense to add ‘per year’. A watt-hour is the energy used by a 1 Watt device running for 1 hour, so you can talk about watt-hours per year as the amount of energy wasted.” As G.I. Joe once said, math is hard.

Photo: Flickr/matthiasxc

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