Yahoo! re-opens e-postage discussion

'CentMail' to benefit charities, harm spammers.

Online giant Yahoo! has launched a website to give a charitable twist to the old idea of combating spam by making senders pay a small price for every email they send. The project, dubbed CentMail in a pun on the popular mail agent sendmail, lets senders voluntarily donate US$0.01 to a charity of their choice for every outgoing email.

As one of the reasons why spam is successful is that it is very cheap to send very large amounts of email, many have suggested that one way to solve the spam problem would be to require senders to pay a 'postage' fee for every email they send. However, experts have generally been sceptical about the possibility of implementing such a solution.

The reactions to Yahoo!'s initiative have mainly been sceptical too, but while Yahoo! claims the idea is purely in the research realm, the company says it wants to use it to "learn about potential ways to put a dent in spam".

The CentMail website, which has a long list of FAQs as well as a technical paper is here, while comments from Sophos can be found here and from Avira here.

21 August 2009

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