Sending newsletters should cost something | Hacker News Reader

Sending newsletters should cost something

rmhsilva.com

62 pointsrmhsilva69 comments

It seems like the point of this is to reduce junk mail by forcing a financial cost to sending mail thereby causing the sender to really consider the content of their message before sending it—except there is a real cost associated with sending traditional mail and there is still a huge amount of garbage traditional mail sent out every day.

Maybe I’m missing the point, though?

No. And I've heard proposals like this going back at least a couple of decades. The theory goes that if you make email expensive (at scale) charging even a trivial fee will make shotgun blasts cost prohibitive. While (very much in theory), a few cents won't deter the casual emailer. Though more likely, as with SMS at one point, people would find ways to route around the expensive pipe because bits are bits at the end of the day.

>> While (very much in theory), a few cents won't deter the casual emailer.

Better yet. Require proof of work where the receiver sets the challenge level. Now you can whitelist people by offering trivial challenges for them. If you really want to email me it's going to take 2 minutes of CPU time - this will be done by the new mail clients in the background, so individual personal cost is essentially zero but bulk mail will require significant resources to send.

That's where we got the idea of proof-of-work in the 90s [1]. The problem is that this makes legitimate use cases like mailing lists very expensive, while providing little protection against spam from botnets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Obviously a subscriber to a mailinglist need to set the cost to 0 for the list sender.

Don't take this the wrong way but... Oh great. Just as the environmental tire fire that is bitcoin and the other crypto-currency bros is winding down, let's replace it with email.

The primary reason why a proof of work implementation for something like bitcoin has a huge environmental impact is because it is a winner take all system. You have thousands of machines trying to do the same thing but only one will get there first and claim all the reward, making all that other work that was done a waste of resources.

At some point 1:N becomes prohibitively expensive for the sender, but that doesn't mean that there is wasted work.

edit: To clarify, not really promoting the idea per say, just commenting on the proof of work statement.

No no no, this one is actually genius. The cost to send an email some one who doesn't know you (and has a real, functioning email) becomes too high to do casually in terms of the base resource (CPU time), I literally could not spam even if I wanted to without throwing absurd resources at the problem, which presumably would also make detection and correction easier if some of these elder-abusing rackets are more profitable than that. But! I could still send you a real email.

It would come down to numbers of course on whether it was actually a good idea, and one of those numbers would have to be "how much work needs to be done before your average spam calling scammer is no longer profitable", but as it stands if there is a number sufficient for that that still allows for regular emails, then the incentive to burn machine time on sending out mass-emails is effectively removed.

The carbon footprint of those proposals is always forgotten. Global warming is a more important issue than junk email.

Sounds like you're just increasing the demand for botnets.

But mail is always priced at a fixed rate. What if your inbox worked on a bonding curve, such that as it filled up it became more expensive to send to (except for whitelisted addresses you approve)? What if your inbox required that the sender owned a particular NFT (proof of membership in a community)?

I mean there are infinite rules to play with in that sense. That's what excites me about crypto.

> What if your inbox worked on a bonding curve, such that as it filled up it became more expensive to send to (except for whitelisted addresses you approve)?

When my inbox fills up with spam I can't get legitimate mail because my inbox is full wouldn't essentially the same thing happen? I dunno why not just use the whitelist and be done?

I think the most promising price scheme is one where the receiver can set it to arbitrary values. Are you in my contact list? Your price is zero. Are you one of my suppliers that likes to send me "new product" notifications every week? You can still send those, because I need to receive notifications from you, but your marketing department has to really want to talk to me because this will cost them 600 seconds of CPU. Did you come across my email on the Internet, and I don't know you at all? Sure, my email is in my signature for anyone to parse, but when you put it in the "To" field of your email client it will inform you it will take 300 seconds of CPU.

What if you just click "spam" for the 1:10000 mails that make it through the filter and moved on with your day?

>I mean there are infinite rules to play with in that sense. That's what excites me about crypto.

Its pretty clear they also like to think about math, so you can probably answer why they don't 'just' do the thing you're asking yourself.

At the moment the cost of sending mail doesn't scale with the amount of mail you send. After spinning up a mail server the difference in cost between sending 1,000 and 10,000 emails is trivial.

Sending 10,000 mails yes, but will the email be actually delivered by large mail providers?

> forcing a financial cost to sending mail

By doing this, you'll encourage the commercialization of email. The people who can fund sending email will be the ones who send email.

Frankly, I don't think email is broken, as is. It is very easy to subscribe and unsubscribe to email lists, and spam filtering generally works. It is relatively easy to control one's inbox, and it is completely under your control, as opposed to the many other services that have tried to replace it.

There is really not that much junk mail in the traditional mail, in my experience. Probably it varies place to place, but it's much MUCH less than what I get in my gmail.

My experience is the opposite. I'm constantly getting junk mail at my home with no filtering, meanwhile gmail does a great job blocking unwanted emails.

I suppose it depends on how you count volume. I maybe get 2 or 3 pieces of "junk" mail a day, along with bill/renewal/etc. associated paper (most of which is handled electronically), and few other letters and packages. Certainly I get way, way more than that in email whether outright junk or the loosely-related result of being on countless industry lists, etc.

I get 10's of actual unsolicited spam emails per day that want me to click a link and run an exe, or buy Canadian drugs, or give bank account details so they can send me millions, etc.

I will say that Gmail seems to catch almost all of that historical sort of spam for me. But I get another 50+ emails per day (not counting those that are dumped in my spam folder--probably because enough people reported them as spam) that are various marketing because I once had a badge scanned at a show, someone bought a list of scanned badges from somewhere, I entered an email to download a doc I wanted to read, a PR pitch because I sometimes write for publications, etc.

None of this is exactly spam and I sometimes go on an unsubscribe binge (and report as spam anything without an unsubscribe) but it's still a flood of mail.

Are you a homeowner? I do get some legitimate mail, though always from companies that already sent me a digital bill I paid by auto-debit anyway, that just refuse to go paper-free even though I'm throwing away all the paper they send me. But the overwhelmingly majority of my mail is unsolicited refinance offers, just as the overwhelming majority of my SMS texts and phone calls are people claiming they heard I want to sell my house.

If communication wasn't worthless before, flooding money markets to drive interest rates to permanent zero finished killing it.

At least with email, most of it gets automatically filtered, though it is also quite annoying there when every company or contractor I have ever purchased anything from ever feels the need to send me every day updates on everything happening with their business.

I think amounts of different types of spam one gets is variable, but it's trivial to ignore email spam. Even a smaller amount of spam in your snail mailbox has some negative side effects over spam in your email mailbox.

* An overstuffed mailbox tells burglars you're away

* There's more waste involved - it mostly goes to landfill (unopened)

* An overstuffed mailbox leaves less room for legit mail (most email services are good at creating a focused mailbox, so there's not the same signal to noise issue there)

* ID theft is probably easier from intercepting a preapproved credit card application than being able to hack your email password

95% of the mail I get goes directly into my trash. And there's no way for me to bounce mail addressed to the previous homeowner.

Not sure if its a good idea,

Email servers get hacked daily, If you’re auto-sending payment to receiver , now there is an incentive for hackers , to spam themselves with your inbox and you pay out of your wallet for that.

Now, yes one could say, that’s no problem just have a multi-wallet approval method , so unless the second one approves, it wont. But now that makes it a bit more complex, especially for newsletters where multiple recipients can be there.

Also, i just think overall Paying to send emails is lame... It sounds all cool and dandy, until it isn’t..

Getting spammed with newsletters from a writer ? Unsubscribe (and if they still continue , mark as spam)

Having to pay to send newsletters, now just adds an extra step for new newsletter authors to fight against fraud , and constantly calculate if its worth it to send emails to a person, and when they’ll stop sending because of that. Pretty sure the receiver, wouldn’t be that much happy.

Nice idea though, Who knows, a refined version of it might make sense.

A sibling comment thread makes the observation that proof of work with variable volumes of work set for different groups could be a good system. Like setting the work needed for your newsletter to 0, and complete unknowns take two minutes of CPU time, that sort of thing.

Well in the mail you have to pay for the stamp. It's about a dollar. You could charge 10 cents...in fact, that's not a bad idea for a cryptocurrency.

Because the existing crypto currencies support 10c transactions if they grow to any kind of audience!

To be fair, if you bulk send via mail, you pay a very small fraction of normal postage.

A very small fraction.

4th class mail, sent to the occupant of every house, is very very cheap.

Really, the cost of adwork, logos, placement, 4 colour print is more expensive than post.

This was one of the original motivations to develop technologies that made cryptocurrency possible. Adam Back released the first proof-of-work implementation, Hashcash, in 1997 as a denial-of-service countermeasure.

The money (probably crypto dust) should be burned instead of sent to the receiver. There should be just a proof of payment (or proof of burn). Could also be replaced with a proof of work for some hashing that the computer do.

Bill Gates proposed sending email costs money. I remember this list from the 00's which included all kind of failed proposals to combat spam.

Newsletters are no issue in EU though. They need to provide a clear and easy way to unsubscribe or they break the law.

I still get newsletters I never signed up for tho. They are breaking the law but it's profitable for them to do so.

Legitimate emails aren't the issue here, you'll keep receiving junk from outside EU or from senders that don't comply

This is probably the list you remember. It got used a lot more before spam filters actually got good enough to protect most inboxes (a development that I think is way under-appreciated today). Clever people on message boards spent a lot more time trying to think up new ways to beat spam than they do now.

Edit - now with good ol' ASCI formatting.

—————————-

  Your post advocates a

  ( ) technical
  ( ) legislative
  ( ) market-based
  ( ) vigilante

  approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

  ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
  ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
  ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
  ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
  ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
  ( ) Users of email will not put up with it
  ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
  ( ) The police will not put up with it
  ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
  ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
  ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
  ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
  ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

  Specifically, your plan fails to account for

  ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
  ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
  ( ) Open relays in foreign countries
  ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
  ( ) Asshats
  ( ) Jurisdictional problems
  ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
  ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
  ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
  ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
  ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
  ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
  ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
  ( ) Extreme profitability of spam
  ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
  ( ) Technically illiterate politicians
  ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
  ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
  ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
  ( ) Outlook

  and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

  ( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
  ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
  ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
  ( ) Blacklists suck
  ( ) Whitelists suck
  ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
  ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
  ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
  ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
  ( ) Sending email should be free
  ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
  ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
  ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
  ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
  ( ) I don't want the government reading my email
  ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

  Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

  ( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
  ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
  ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Thank you, that is it!

I believe it was HN's Paul Graham who innovated wrt spam filters.

The provider I used was onto it (I used Mutt over SSH with them and all spam was in a seperate folder due to procmail IIRC but later they added spam and virus filters which you could customize), that was before Gmail existed though. They do the same, for free, but you pay with your privacy.

You don’t get spam from non eu countries?

...or you could just mark your spam as such and block the sender to reduce future junk mail without ruining a nice system of essentially free global communication for everyone who uses it as such.

The sender is different for almost every email though. Sometimes one sender will be used 3-4 times but that's about the max.

The weirdest thing about this proposal to me is that it picks the use case where the proposal is backwards. If someone is receiving a valuable newsletter they actually want to receive, the recipient ought to be paying for it. Senders would need to be paying for emails that people don't want.

If newsletter senders are paying to send out they're going to have to then have some sort of separate charging mechanism from the recipients to get them to compensate the sender.

I was thinking about this too. If I had valuable information, why would I pay you to give it to you? This deincentivizes the free sharing of knowledge through email. Most people will opt for cheaper and more efficient communications methods for noncommercial communication. When that happens, the spammers will follow anyways.