Paying For email - 4th February 2004
Credit: Sydney Morning Herald Online

The days of sending emails for free may be numbered. The owners of the two largest email systems in the world, Microsoft and Yahoo, are considering ways of imposing a "postage" fee for emails.

Internet experts have long suggested that the rising tide of junk email, or spam, would turn into a trickle if senders had to pay even as little as one cent for each message.

And Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, has told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that spam would not be a problem in two years, partly because of systems that would require people to pay to send email.

By making emailers buy electronic "stamps" - in fact, encrypted code numbers - the illegal spammers could be forced to identify themselves, or give up.

A one cent charge might be minor for most emailers, but it could destroy spamming businesses that send a million offers in the hope 10 people will respond.

Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft has made a firm commitment to charging postage, in part because the idea still faces substantial opposition among internet users.

While it could give them a big stream of revenue, academic researchers have proposed complex stamp systems in which email recipients would be ones who set the price on messages before they could enter their in-boxes. Mr Gates even suggested a system that would allow users to waive charges for friends and relatives.

Yahoo is quietly evaluating an email postage plan being developed by Goodmail, a Silicon Valley start-up company. It proposes that only high-volume mailers pay postage at first - a cent per email.

The money would go to the email recipient's internet access provider. But the company suggests that the internet providers share the payments with their users, either through rebates or by lowering monthly fees. Under this system, a mass emailer would sign up with Goodmail, buying a block of stamps - encrypted code numbers that it would insert in the header of each email message.

If the internet provider of the recipient participates in the system, it decrypts the stamp and submits it to Goodmail. Only then is the sender's account charged a cent and the receiving service provider paid the money, minus a service fee for Goodmail.

Senders would not pay for stamps that were not used, but they would pay whether or not an email recipient read the message.

However, some experts fear big spammers will be happy to pay the postage. "It is the spammers who are the ones with the big pockets," says Charles Stiles, manager of the postmaster department at America Online, who worries such a system might restrict the wrong mail.

AOL is taking a different approach and is testing a system under development by the Internet Research Task Force.

The system, called the Sender Permitted From, or SPF, creates a way for the owner of an internet domain, such as aol.com, to specify which computers are authorised to send email with aol.com return addresses.

That allows a recipient's email system to determine whether a message being represented as coming from someone at aol.com really is from that address. Most spam being sent now uses forged return addresses.

Microsoft has been floating a similar proposal, labeled "caller ID", that could be expanded in the future to accommodate more sophisticated anti-spam approaches including internet postage systems.

Discussions are under way among the backers of SPF, Microsoft and others involved in email to reach a compromise sender notification system.

All these proposals can run into problems because there are legitimate cases when mail sent by one domain claims to be from another. For example, online greeting-card services will send messages with the return address of the person sending the card, even though the message does not go through the sender's email account.

People taking part in the discussion say that companies such as greeting-card services may need to change their e-mail software to comply with the new standards.

"Every proposed scheme will break parts of the way email works today," said Hans Peter Brondmo, a senior vice-president of Digital Impact who has represented big emailers in the spam technology negotiations.

The challenge, he said, is to find a system that will require as little retrofitting as possible to email systems.

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Sydney Morning Herald Online

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