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Re: [Asrg] Forbes: Pay up

2003-07-02 16:40:40
"Charge the sender" was discussed yesterday at the famous 'spam summit' at the 
house of commons in 
the UK.  View seems to be: this will further encourage the practice of spammers 
to gain control of 
legitimate email servers, with the intention of sending out spam from an 
'authorised' sender (the 
recent piece on the BBC re British Airways as a source of spam refers..). This 
idea will NOT work 
in practice.  Naive innocents would pick up the charge.

Roy

--
Roy S. Walker
Chief Executive
ADVA Technologies Ltd
+44 (0)8450 539331
www.advascan.com


On Wed, 02 Jul 2003 16:16:16 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
A promising way to curb spam: Charge the sender.

Hoping to stop the evil epidemic of spam, Philip Raymond is putting
a price
on it. The 46-year-old software executive has a provisional patent
on a
service called Vanquish, which requires e-mail senders to post a
cash bond
of 5 cents into a bank account for every piece of e-mail they send.
If a
recipient judges the mail to be illegitimate, the sender loses the
nickel,
with four pennies going to the recipient's Internet service provider
and
one penny going to Vanquish as a processing fee. If the recipient
okays the
message, that sender is cleared from then on. But if the human or
machine
behind the spam won't post a bond, the message doesn't go through.

With Internet service providers processing 6.9 billion spam messages
a day,
the price for senders could add up quickly. "We don't search for
combinations of words and numbers," Raymond says. "We let recipients
decide
if they want it."

In a trial of the service, 400 customers from eight small Internet
service
providers were offered Vanquish for free. Vanquish blocked spam
cold, but
users also experienced installation problems and delays in checking
e-mail.
Vanquish, based outside Boston, says it has fixed the glitches for
its June
launch, and aims to have a lofty 35 million users by the end of the
year.
It expects ISPs to pay 20 to 45 cents per customer per month.

Raymond, who has started and sold two previous tech firms, figures
that
legitimate marketers, accustomed to paying for their messages in
other
media, will understand and appreciate Vanquish. As it is, private
filtering
systems and spam blacklists block plenty of marketers' e-mails.
Yahoo and
AOL have destroyed messages between Procter & Gamble and customers
who
agreed to be contacted, as well as acceptance letters to Harvard
University
applicants.

Raymond has a good idea--other firms such as IronPort have also
announced
spam-bond products--but doesn't have much money. Vanquish is burning
through $38,000 a month, even with three engineers working for one-
third of
their usual salary. Recently Raymond had to beg his advisory board
for
another $75,000.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2003/0707/110.html


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