Bill Gates may have his detractors in the Internet community, but he united the world's e-mail users last month with a pledge to end the scourge of spam — or junk e-mail — by the year 2006. The chairman of Microsoft Corp. outlined a number of possible strategies, like creating “computational puzzles” to thwart bulk e-mail programs, but the one he's placing his bets on is electronic postage. It's a proposal that some detractors say is technologically unfeasible and may be little more than a veiled attempt at a money grab by Microsoft and other large e-mail providers.
People involved with the Web have been whispering about e-mail postage — also known as “sender pays” — for a decade, but it resurfaced last month when Mr. Gates broached the topic at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The belief is that e-postage would deter rampant spammers; a 1-cent levy on each e-mail, for example, would be ruinous for companies that send out millions of unsolicited ads every day with the hope that a handful of people will respond.
Mr. Gates thinks spammers should be punished retroactively, in a transaction known as a “charge-back.” When a person receives a piece of mail that they deem as spam, they press a designated button and the sender is charged a fee for that message.
Observers agree that combatting spam is a noble and worthy endeavour but feel that the notion of e-postage is fraught with logistical and financial problems.
Bill Sweetman, president and founder of e-business consultancy Kalixo, says the scheme outlined by Mr. Gates is well-intentioned but has an inherent weakness. “The problem with this is you can't find these folks in the first place, so where are you going to send the invoice?” he asks.
The sheer volume of spam circulating the Web decreases the capacity and speed of ISPs, a fact that affects all Internet users. That's why Yahoo Inc. is currently exploring an e-mail postage proposal developed by Goodmail Systems Inc., a startup based in California's Silicon Valley. In this scenario, the cost would be imposed on the e-marketer upon sending the message. Under Goodmail's system, a mass e-mailer would buy a block of stamps. Each stamp would take the form of an encrypted code that would identify the sender and appear in the header of an e-mail message. When the message is sent, the participating ISP would decrypt the stamp and remit it to Goodmail. The idea requires ISPs to opt into the system and presumes customers would pay a premium to participate, since it promises to virtually rid their inboxes of spam.
The biggest Canadian ISPs have no plans to use e-postage at this juncture. Taanta Gupta, vice-president of communications for Rogers Cable Inc., says her company (which has 790,000 subscribers) has “not had any discussions regarding the introduction of e-postage.” Neither has Sympatico.ca. “An e-mail microcharge payment system, whatever you want to call it, has not been identified as a service that we are exploring,” says Charlotte Burke, senior vice-president, consumer Internet services at Bell Canada, which runs the Sympatico service. She says Sympatico (which has 2.2 million subscribers) enforces a zero-spam policy among its users and will continue to use filtering software in an attempt to keep junk mail at bay.
As a result of opposition from many Internet users, neither Yahoo nor Microsoft (which owns the free Internet e-mail service Hotmail) have openly committed to charging postage.
To some observers, the notion of e-postage is just the latest chapter in the continuing dispute about introducing fees for specific uses of the Internet.
“It's really difficult to charge for something that has always been free,” says Adrian Capobianco, director of client strategy at Publicis NetWorks. While some ISPs might implement such a system, he says, others would inevitably keep e-mails postage-free.
Innovators like Goodmail are looking into applications that would punish spammers without penalizing rightful users. Mr. Capobianco feels that the coding involved in separating good e-mailers from bad ones would affect the expediency of Internet service.
“The World Wide Web is based on efficiencies, and everything that's being proposed is based on adding planned inefficiencies into the model,” Mr. Capobianco says.
He notes that proactive anti-spam efforts may not be entirely altruistic, as there is great money to be made in taming junk mail. In the tactics outlined by Microsoft and Yahoo, the 1 cent charged for each unwanted message could be shared by the ISP and the company that designed the application. “Maybe they see an opportunity,” Mr. Capobianco says. “There are billions of e-mails sent daily. [Catching] a very, very small chunk of that ... would be huge revenue.”
Even if e-postage becomes ubiquitous, Mr. Sweetman is not convinced it will quell the problem: “Spam has been illegal for many years, but the fact that it's illegal hasn't stopped these companies from churning this stuff out.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
