Spam News

Yahoo looking at pay-per-email to fight spam

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Yahoo researchers are looking at a new way to revive the idea of using email postage stamps to help distinguish between good emails and spam.

Called CentMail, Yahoo hopes the idea of donating 1 cent per email to charity can overcome people's reticence to pay for something that's free.

The sender's email client certifies each outgoing message with an unforgeable stamp issued by the CentMail server. The recipient's email client verifies with CentMail that messages are appropriately stamped and have not been queried by an unexpectedly large number of other recipients.

Yahoo called the idea a research project and "an example of how we're open to experimenting with new approaches for addressing some of the difficult issues that can impact our users and the internet at large."

But critics have pointed out that because using pay-per-email is optional, it is unlikely to reach a critical mass.

Mark Harris, VP of security firm Sophos, panned the idea on the company's blog. Harris points out that pay-per-email would make it uneconomical for not just spammers, but legitimate companies as well.