Microsoft Preps Pay-For Spam Scheme

[Spinner]

Microsoft once again is trying to keep Spammers at bay by announcing their plans to implement a scheme that would charge spammers for sending junk mail.


The pay-per-spam scheme is definitely the more radical approach. Microsoft Research (MSR) has been dabbling for years with the concept of making spammers pay: in cash, in compute cycles and/or in memory cycles. Microsoft Research's idea for this is called "Penny Black."


For the full story:
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,0,1139067,00.asp?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535

[Keebler]

Perhaps Microsoft will truly do us a service with this one. My poor AOL account is still getting about 110 spams per week... not as bad as it used to be, but I'm sure paying a fee would put a cramp in the style of all those (seemingly) millions of people trying to sell me pills and equipment to improve my libido... :rolleyes:


Please don't haze me for having an AOL account... I swear, it's not my primary one and I didn't inhale. ;)

[danball1976]

I wonder what they'll make the spammers pay for each e-mail they send? I would suggest $1 per spam e-mail. :D

[csimon]

how clever ...another chance for ms to make money at our expense.

[danball1976]

They aren't going to make us pay, they are going to make the poeple who send us the spam pay.

[Shorty]

danball1976 said
They aren't going to make us pay, they are going to make the poeple who send us the spam pay.

Read:

csimon said
how clever ...another chance for ms to make money at our expense.

The money goes to Microsoft. So where in that do they NOT make money?

[Keebler]

Well they were also discussing having them pay in the hardware sense, which wouldn't line MS's pockets. Basically, as long as they can tell I'm not a spammer when I send a mass mail to all my friends, I don't care if MS makes some extra cash in this equation. Finding a way to effectively and desciminantly hinder spam would be a tremendous boon to the internet, IMHO.

[T-BirD]

The amount of bandwidth used by spammers must be costing ISP's an insane amount of money. If this even halves my 100ish spams per day, I'm all for it.

[Nixxer]

csimon said
how clever ...another chance for ms to make money at our expense.

Its nor our expense. This scheme will benefit Microsoft by giving them yet another source of income; and us by having less spam. Its worth it seeing how we arn't actually doing anything for this.

[Spinner]

Well I don't care who benefits as long as SPAMMERS get canned (to coin a phrase). I have had my Zoom email account for as long as I can remember, probably getting on for 7 or 8 years, and I get about 80 spam emails a day. So the more big players like Microsoft do to try and stop SPAM the better.