O tempora, o spammers

[xela]

One of the bad ideas for dealing with spam that came up in the early days — not Canter & Siegel early, but not this millennium either, I'm pretty sure — was what I think of as Internet Postage Stamps:* charging a small fee for each recipient of every message you send. We all agreed it was a terrible idea, and IIRC it didn't gain much traction even among politicians and disappeared pretty quickly.

But every once in a while I get a piece of spam so idiotic that I find myself wondering if it was really such a bad idea, on the theory that if they had to spend even a penny per thousand, they'd go broke without finding enough morons to make it pay off, and the rest of us would have fewer reasons to think ill of our fellow humans, having been exposed to fewer reasons to wonder just how dumb a person can be.

This one arrived in my MIT inbox today (another testament to the expensive commercial spam filter the new "professional" MIT IS (whatever they're calling it this year) pays for):

We just got this from the irs.
It is related to mit.edu.
Please check it out asap.
[-- Attachment #2: mit.edu_irs.doc --]

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*  Googling this would obviously be useless in 2016, even if what I call it in my head turned out to actually be what the proponents called it at the time. And I'm not interested enough in refreshing my memory about the history to try to come up with search terms that would be useful. But if any of you are that curious, please share what you find.

Comments

[dmaze]

I remember there being a plugin for Gnus for a scheme called Hashcash where a sender had to do a little bit of cryptographically intensive computation to create a valid email; enough that you wouldn't notice it in casual email use, but enough, in principle, to slow down spammers. According to the top of that Wikipedia article, that core algorithm in fact turned into Bitcoin mining, so 20 years later this is almost equivalent to saying "I'll bounce all of your email unless you attach BTC 0.0001 in a header".

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Interesting. The problem with doing that sort of thing ad-hoc is that you either have to be okay with bouncing mail from people you actually want to hear from who aren't technically proficient enough to do the thing. Or just treat the micropayment as another factor in your spam scoring.

Which aren't show-stoppers by any means. Hmm. I wish I could remember the details of why the idea went over like a lead balloon BITD. Violates the traditions of the open Internet — that was doubtless part of it. Required a non-existent micropayment infrastructure. Burdensome to the volunteers who ran (and still run) the email lists that have always been central to the 'Net as community. And to the universities that generally hosted them. (Google and Yahoo have taken on a lot of that — but last I heard, Yahoo was in even worse financial shape than a lot of universities.) None of those seem insurmountable in 2016. But it's not like I've given it a whole lot of thought.