Bill Gates says all spammers will have to pay to send mail in the near future
 

"Two years from now, spam will be solved," he told a select group of World Economic Forum (news - web sites) participants at this Alpine ski resort. "And a lot of progress this year," he added at the event late Friday, hosted by U.S. talk show host Charlie Rose.

Gates said Microsoft, where he has the title of chief software designer, is working on a solution based on the concept of "proof," or identifying the sender of the e-mail.

The most promising, Gates said, was a method that would hit the sender of an e-mail in the pocketbook.

People would set a level of monetary risk ? low or high, depending on their choice ? for receiving e-mail from strangers. If the e-mail turns out to be from a long-lost relative, for example, the recipient would charge nothing. But if it is unwanted spam, the sender would have to fork over the cash.

"In the long run, the monetary (method) will be dominant," Gates predicted.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor..._forum_gates_4

Is he saying that you would have to put money in escrow before sending out any email?

whack

as long as there is email, there will be spam

as simple as that :2 cents:

Well he can just kiss my ass, I'm gonna keep spamming everyone

im sure he'll have a % on both sides =)

what happens when shit starts blue screening and your escrow disappears

someone outta tell him maybe he should run the anti drug campain in the us. everytime a drug dealer gets cought they risk going to jail. that will sure stop them dead in there tracks, just as this will stop spam.

What if I have a long converstaion with you.... then retroactivly deny your e-mails?

I read it 3 times and it still doesn't make sense to me.

I think what he's saying is that you would have to put the money up front, before your email would be delivered.

So, some kid with 3 million AOL addresses couldn't send any emails unless he put into escrow the combined total of the money that every one of those 3 million people required to get an email. Say each one wants $00.01, the kid would have to put $30,000 in escrow before his email would be delivered. If the messages were spam, then each user would keep the .01 - if it was real mail, they would just let the money stay in escrow for whoever sent the mail.

Does anyone know more about this proposal? Is this something new or do anti-spammers already have a working version somewhere?

<FONT Size=6>Billy will save the world</Font>

and who is he to lay down these laws? i thought he ran a software company, not congress.

Great news.... I don't believe it tough... :2 cents:

Even if he puts this we're going to continue and find new methods anyway :thumbsup

Die!!! Fucking spammer.... :BangBang: :ak47: :BangBang:

And so spammers will use Linux, who cares, most do already...

Spam was pretty much solved with Outlook 2003, if you ask me.

It's not exactly as if M$ has a long history of products that do what they're supposed to anyway.

It wouldn't matter what system you used, you would still have to pay to have your mail delivered to each person.

No email would be delivered to AOL, Hotmail, Earthlink, Yahoo, etc., unless the sender has first put money into an escrow account. For a normal person who sends 100 mails a week, you could keep $10 in the escrow account and all your mail would go through without problem. The only time money is taken out of escrow is if the person getting the mail wants to punish you.

If you were a spammer, you would have to put up tens of thousands of dollars to mail a list and you would lose the money if people considered it to be spam.

I have no idea if it would work, but it's a more interesting idea the more you think about it.

And who handles the escrow? MS? So they get sent millions to use as free investment money? And what about people who don't use an MS OS?

so don't mail big domains, problem solved. theres still plenty of small domain business left :)

That's probably the plan - it's a "free" service, but they hold the money in Escrow.

I have no idea how it really works, I'm just making shit up from reading the original article. :)

:glugglug

Erm, it wouldnt work heh first off , anyone who has an email server would have to be included in that only if they wanted to be, meaning, theres THOUSANDS of companies that own their own email server, what if they dont want people to pahve to pay.

Secondly, so then for it to work Microslut would have to reroute all the mail through their office just to make sure that people HAD funds in their account to send it.

Thats like the US Postal service requiring you send them a bank statement with each mail you send.

excellent!

lets see what happens

email stamps for sale here.
cheap.
load up now before the price goes up.

:thumbsup

In two years? Who cares!

I'll be retired by then..

Spamming is good..

This has been predicted since 1998. The idea was started by Esther Dyson. I read it in her book years ago:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...lance&s=books.

For anyone who is curious, Mrs. Dyson was the original Chairman of www.icann.org.

Ironport is already trying to lock down this whole paridigm. Ironport Appliances, Bonded sender -> http://www.bondedsender.com , and Spamcop are all under their belt.

you have to cut the internet to cut off the spam

He's not saying you can't spam. You can SPAM all day long, but your mail won't be delivered without prepaying for it.

Now, how can we profit from the new Internet Postal System ?

good luck doing that... there will ALWAYS be ways around anything..

I'm thinking all he has to do is get the big ISP's to cooperate and it could work.
If you spam from your aol account then aol adds the charge to your bill.
If your mail server sends mail through level3, then level3 tacks the charges onto your bandwidth bill.

Something like that.

It's all about having the big players agree on a plan. If that is achieved, it is very possible.

well, they've been trying to put postage on emails for a long time. guess they're getting a little closer now.

i doubt it

What happens with free email services? Do they all become pay to play? And what about people using trojaned proxies? Who gets to pay then?