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Spam costs you and your employees productivity and computingpower. And that means it costs you money. Now money is at thecenter of a new anti-spam movement. "E-postage" is theconcept of attaching virtual stamps to e-mail to reduce unwantedbulk e-mail. The idea is to create a monetary barrier similar towhat keeps our physical mailboxes from overflowing.
We can hear the collective groan, "Don't make us payfor e-mail!" That attitude, prevalent among growing businessesthat rely on legitimate bulk e-mail, is one block to e-postageproposals. "The only people who seem to be enthusiastic aboute-postage are the people who plan to sell you stamps," saysJohn R. Levine, co-author of Fighting Spam for Dummies and co-chairof the Anti-Spam Research Group (http://asrg.sp.am).
Technical and implementation difficulties combined with anaversion to paying extra for e-mail seem to spell doom fore-postage. Still, companies like Goodmail Systems (www.goodmail.com) arepressing forward with their e-postage offerings, and even Microsofthas been moving in that direction.
Another proposal is "hashcash." Hashcash requires asender's computer to solve a computational problem as proof ofgood faith. It would tie up spammers' computing resources andcut their ability to send masses of e-mail. Practically, though, ithas just as many issues as e-postage. "These days, spammerssend all their spam through hijacked PCs. The number of hijackedPCs is enormous. The bad guys have more computing power than thegood guys, and they can solve hashcash problems plenty fast,"says Levine.
While many anti-spam proposals have more holes than a slice ofSwiss cheese, that doesn't mean there's no hope for gettingthe problem under control. Levine likens fighting spam to finding acure for cancer. There isn't just one disease and one cure, butmany problems and many possible solutions. It will take moreeffective legislation modeled after the junk-fax law of the 1990s,technical changes for better sender authentication, and a good doseof industry initiative to can spam.
