[HN Gopher] Sending newsletters should cost something
___________________________________________________________________
Sending newsletters should cost something
Author : rmhsilva
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-10-05 11:51 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rmhsilva.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rmhsilva.com)
| teitoklien wrote:
| 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.
| csomar wrote:
| 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.
| burnished wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| This was one of the original motivations to develop
| technologies that made cryptocurrency possible. Adam Back
| released the first proof-of-work implementation, Hashcash, in
| 1997 as a denial-of-service countermeasure.
| bbarnett wrote:
| To be fair, if you bulk send via mail, you pay a very small
| fraction of normal postage.
|
| A very small fraction.
|
| 4th class mail, sent to the occupant of every house, is very
| very cheap.
|
| Really, the cost of adwork, logos, placement, 4 colour print
| is more expensive than post.
| etothepii wrote:
| Because the existing crypto currencies support 10c
| transactions if they grow to any kind of audience!
| jonwest wrote:
| 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?
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| 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.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Are you a homeowner? I do get some legitimate mail, though
| always from companies that already sent me a digital bill I
| paid by auto-debit anyway, that just refuse to go paper-free
| even though I'm throwing away all the paper they send me. But
| the overwhelmingly majority of my mail is unsolicited
| refinance offers, just as the overwhelming majority of my SMS
| texts and phone calls are people claiming they heard I want
| to sell my house.
|
| If communication wasn't worthless before, flooding money
| markets to drive interest rates to permanent zero finished
| killing it.
|
| At least with email, most of it gets automatically filtered,
| though it is also quite annoying there when every company or
| contractor I have ever purchased anything from ever feels the
| need to send me every day updates on everything happening
| with their business.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I think amounts of different types of spam one gets is
| variable, but it's trivial to ignore email spam. Even a
| smaller amount of spam in your snail mailbox has some
| negative side effects over spam in your email mailbox.
|
| * An overstuffed mailbox tells burglars you're away
|
| * There's more waste involved - it mostly goes to landfill
| (unopened)
|
| * An overstuffed mailbox leaves less room for legit mail
| (most email services are good at creating a focused mailbox,
| so there's not the same signal to noise issue there)
|
| * ID theft is probably easier from intercepting a preapproved
| credit card application than being able to hack your email
| password
| luciusism wrote:
| My experience is the opposite. I'm constantly getting junk
| mail at my home with no filtering, meanwhile gmail does a
| great job blocking unwanted emails.
| ghaff wrote:
| I suppose it depends on how you count volume. I maybe get 2
| or 3 pieces of "junk" mail a day, along with
| bill/renewal/etc. associated paper (most of which is
| handled electronically), and few other letters and
| packages. Certainly I get way, way more than that in email
| whether outright junk or the loosely-related result of
| being on countless industry lists, etc.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I get 10's of actual unsolicited spam emails per day that
| want me to click a link and run an exe, or buy Canadian
| drugs, or give bank account details so they can send me
| millions, etc.
| ghaff wrote:
| I will say that Gmail seems to catch almost all of that
| historical sort of spam for me. But I get another 50+
| emails per day (not counting those that are dumped in my
| spam folder--probably because enough people reported them
| as spam) that are various marketing because I once had a
| badge scanned at a show, someone bought a list of scanned
| badges from somewhere, I entered an email to download a
| doc I wanted to read, a PR pitch because I sometimes
| write for publications, etc.
|
| None of this is exactly spam and I sometimes go on an
| unsubscribe binge (and report as spam anything without an
| unsubscribe) but it's still a flood of mail.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> While (very much in theory), a few cents won't deter the
| casual emailer.
|
| Better yet. Require proof of work where the receiver sets the
| challenge level. Now you can whitelist people by offering
| trivial challenges for them. If you really want to email me
| it's going to take 2 minutes of CPU time - this will be done
| by the new mail clients in the background, so individual
| personal cost is essentially zero but bulk mail will require
| significant resources to send.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| Sounds like you're just increasing the demand for botnets.
| ghaff wrote:
| Don't take this the wrong way but... Oh great. Just as the
| environmental tire fire that is bitcoin and the other
| crypto-currency bros is winding down, let's replace it with
| email.
| burnished wrote:
| No no no, this one is actually genius. The cost to send
| an email some one who doesn't know you (and has a real,
| functioning email) becomes too high to do casually in
| terms of the base resource (CPU time), I literally could
| not spam even if I wanted to without throwing absurd
| resources at the problem, which presumably would also
| make detection and correction easier if some of these
| elder-abusing rackets are more profitable than that. But!
| I could still send you a real email.
|
| It would come down to numbers of course on whether it was
| actually a good idea, and one of those numbers would have
| to be "how much work needs to be done before your average
| spam calling scammer is no longer profitable", but as it
| stands if there is a number sufficient for that that
| still allows for regular emails, then the incentive to
| burn machine time on sending out mass-emails is
| effectively removed.
| edvinbesic wrote:
| The primary reason why a proof of work implementation for
| something like bitcoin has a huge environmental impact is
| because it is a winner take all system. You have
| thousands of machines trying to do the same thing but
| only one will get there first and claim all the reward,
| making all that other work that was done a waste of
| resources.
|
| At some point 1:N becomes prohibitively expensive for the
| sender, but that doesn't mean that there is wasted work.
|
| edit: To clarify, not really promoting the idea per say,
| just commenting on the proof of work statement.
| wongarsu wrote:
| That's where we got the idea of proof-of-work in the 90s
| [1]. The problem is that this makes legitimate use cases
| like mailing lists very expensive, while providing little
| protection against spam from botnets.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
| rightbyte wrote:
| Obviously a subscriber to a mailinglist need to set the
| cost to 0 for the list sender.
| brohee wrote:
| The carbon footprint of those proposals is always
| forgotten. Global warming is a more important issue than
| junk email.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 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.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I think the most promising price scheme is one where the
| receiver can set it to arbitrary values. Are you in my
| contact list? Your price is zero. Are you one of my suppliers
| that likes to send me "new product" notifications every week?
| You can still send those, because I need to receive
| notifications from you, but your marketing department has to
| really want to talk to me because this will cost them 600
| seconds of CPU. Did you come across my email on the Internet,
| and I don't know you at all? Sure, my email is in my
| signature for anyone to parse, but when you put it in the
| "To" field of your email client it will inform you it will
| take 300 seconds of CPU.
| pc86 wrote:
| What if you just click "spam" for the 1:10000 mails that make
| it through the filter and moved on with your day?
| burnished wrote:
| >I mean there are infinite rules to play with in that
| sense. That's what excites me about crypto.
|
| Its pretty clear they also like to think about math, so you
| can probably answer why they don't 'just' do the thing
| you're asking yourself.
| dangerface wrote:
| > 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)?
|
| When my inbox fills up with spam I can't get legitimate mail
| because my inbox is full wouldn't essentially the same thing
| happen? I dunno why not just use the whitelist and be done?
| qqii wrote:
| 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.
| brianoconnor wrote:
| Sending 10,000 mails yes, but will the email be actually
| delivered by large mail providers?
| boplicity wrote:
| > 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.
| Fnoord wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I still get newsletters I never signed up for tho. They are
| breaking the law but it's profitable for them to do so.
| graeme wrote:
| You don't get spam from non eu countries?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| 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!
| Fnoord wrote:
| Thank you, that is it!
|
| I believe it was HN's Paul Graham who innovated wrt spam
| filters.
|
| The provider I used was onto it (I used Mutt over SSH with
| them and all spam was in a seperate folder due to procmail
| IIRC but later they added spam and virus filters which you
| could customize), that was before Gmail existed though. They
| do the same, for free, but you pay with your privacy.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Honestly, I just want email, phone, ect, to only allow contacts
| from whitelists. (Kind of like how Facebook Messenger works.)
| erellsworth wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something, but why would any senders adopt
| this?
| sneak wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
| qqii wrote:
| Yes, this is a very old idea that resurfaced when javascript
| based crypto miners as an alternative to advertising became
| infamous.
| tomcooks wrote:
| 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
| cyptus wrote:
| 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
| D13Fd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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!
| chadlavi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| chadlavi wrote:
| right and that... sucks? and is bad?
|
| A lot of the passion/hobby newsletters I receive would not
| exist if the person writing them had to pay to send the
| emails. Adding a cost to distributing information does not
| increase the quality of distributed information, it just
| increases the percentage of information distributed that is
| trying to make the sender money.
|
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding the article. Are they talking only
| about marketing newsletters or just any kind of mass-
| emailing? Because sure, I'd support adding a toll to sending
| marketing emails. If your intent is to sell something, it
| should cost you some money to advertise.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Any email. But the receiver could refund/credit/whitelist
| certain senders; there's no reason this mechanism would
| have outsized impact on hobby lists other than the
| subscriber would have to somehow mark them as "safe".
|
| In theory, this whole approach should work pretty well. I
| doubt the practical hurdles are surmountable, however.
|
| The "prove-work-to-deliver" approach seems to have all the
| same benefits without a complicated, slow, and privacy-
| impacting ledger.
| upofadown wrote:
| 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.
| jerf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Cryptonic wrote:
| Good idea. I think email should be save and participant-
| transparent. This would also avoid a lot of scam and phishing.
| EGreg wrote:
| _"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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| qsort wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's solving the problem of "what else haven't we tried to
| screw up yet by adding a Blockchain?"
| fanf2 wrote:
| 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.
| rmhsilva wrote:
| This is great, thanks for the link. Love how it was written in
| 2004.
| phkahler wrote:
| 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.
| remram wrote:
| 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?
| jedberg wrote:
| 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).
| zivkovicp wrote:
| ...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 wrote:
| The sender is different for almost every email though.
| Sometimes one sender will be used 3-4 times but that's about
| the max.
| gego wrote:
| ...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 ;)
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