Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

maybe using Bitcoin for email postage could reduce email spam?

A possible solution for reducing spam would be to take a fee for sending emails.
Even the smallest possible amount of 0.01 USD/EUR/GBP... would cost the average spammer to much money so that spamming wouldn't be profitable.

Problem with offline cash is that transaction fee for very small amounts is inadequate.

Maybe Bitcoin could be an alternative?
How could it work?

What's your opinion?

You could set up an email service, "PayMeToSendMeEmail.com".  So if someone wants to contact you they have to send x bitcoins.

This won't work because it does not distinguish between spam and legitimate bulk mail, of which there is lots. Or do you want to bankrupt Facebook?

Spam is already a solved problem, pretty much. If you have a spam problem outsource your mail to Google. Job done.

i wouldn't mind spam if i got paid for it.

...that implicates that bulk mail is legitimate.
Maybe that shouldn't?

Bankrupting Facebook? Who cares?

Bulk physical mail pays postage, albeit at a reduced rate, so how would this somehow bankrupt everybody?

So if I want to send a newsletter to 2000 members of my site it will cost me 20euro?
Not to mention all the activation mails, thank mails for registration and users lost their password.  :-\

I'm totally against it, email is free and should stay that way.
If people don't want spam, use a spamfilter.

If I lost my password for this forum, guess how I get a new password.
Yes, by mail. So if I want to screw a boardadmin, I just request 1000 times a day a new password.
Or I ask an email for every post done in a topic, nice if 100 people do that and get 500 mails a day.

See how long it takes before the board is bankrupt.

The solution could be kind of Bitcoin handshaking.

The boards mail server sends the new password to your mailserver, 0.01 BTC attached.
You want this email, and so you accept the mail and send back the 0.01 BTC to the boards mail server.

Some viagra spammer sends an email. You don't want it. You keep the BTC.
After one million emails the spammer is gone.

You want the boards email but don't return the BTC? You're fired because you're not trustworthy.

Could work. Maybe.

If the spam goes to your spam folder, then it's (nearly) a solved problem, right? Obviously in an ideal world there'd be no need to check your spam folder .... and we're getting there, see this slashdot story from today

   http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/12/30/1411242

There's a simpler way to finish spam off and it's already being deployed, it's reputation + DKIM authentication of mail. In this scheme people send mail and sign it. If users press the "report spam" button on mail from that signer the reputation decreases a bit, if they receive mail and don't report it as spam the reputation goes up a bit. If the reputation drops too far that mail starts going to the spam folder and if it drops far enough it'll start being bounced.

All major email companies both sign their own mail and use signatures for reputation. It works. If you have a serious spam problem with gmail/yahoo/hotmail you are probably forwarding mail or doing something else that makes authentication difficult.