Putting a price on spam

Email-forwarding system lets users set a fee to let spam through.

Email-forwarding system Boxbe has come up with a new way around the spam problem - by letting its users set a fee for anyone wanting to send them emails.

Users signing up to the free service get an email address which they can safely make public, on social networking and dating sites, on personal blogs, in online forms or wherever they like. The service then checks mails sent to the address against an approved list of senders set up by the user, and if they're from someone on the pre-defined 'friends list', the messages are forwarded to the user's genuine email address. If not, the senders are contacted informing them of the cost associated with emailing the member in question.

The site hopes to fund itself by taking a slice of any fees taken, and also by recruiting advertisers willing to pay to contact its members. The advertisers would be given access to personal interest information provided by members interested in getting paid to receive advertising, enabling them to send highly targeted marketing campaigns. Recipients have to acknowledge receipt of mails, to ensure they can't just set a low fee and sit back while the advertising rolls in, and users who don't want any adverts can omit details from the data-gathering fields and set their acceptance fee to up to $99 dollars, which should be enough to deter all but the most determined of online stalkers.

'This is certainly a novel way around the ever-growing spam problem,' said John Hawes, Technical Consultant at Virus Bulletin. 'As spammers' techniques grow more diverse and sophisticated, so anti-spam tricks and tactics evolve and develop to keep pace. Since the advent of free webmail services, web users have been setting up semi-disposable addresses for public use, and abandoning them when they get swamped with spam - services such as 10MinuteMail even provide self-destructing accounts. Now members of this new service can filter spam while making money. Whether it thrives depends, of course, on the take-up rate from both sides, but also on how open their system is to the abuses that spammers and online advertisers seem so devious and relentless in devising.'

Boxbe users can choose to donate any takings from their accounts to US charities. More information on the service is on the Boxbe site.

14 December 2006

Tags: spam del.icio.us digg this