In the latest of his periodic Executive Emails, Gates played up the importance of recent developments in the sender authentication space, and gave a few glimpses of features the company hopes to add to its SmartScreen anti-spam technology.
But Gates downplayed his other longstanding idea about changing the economics of spam – by forcing email senders to make a monetary commitment to the recipient, which is only cashed in if the sender determines it to be spam.
This system would essentially reverse the economics of spam, as spammers would have to pick targets carefully. Some have suggested that such systems might open the door for service providers to charge senders a fee for email delivery, Gates wrote.
He added: We firmly believe that monetary charges would be inappropriate and contrary to the fundamental purpose of the internet as an extremely efficient and inexpensive medium for communications.
In previous vision statements, such as at a speech at the World Economic Forum in January or in a USA Today interview a year ago, Gates said this financial bond method would be dominant, and could kill the spam problem in as little as two years.
A Microsoft spokesperson said previous statements to this effect had generated a lot of calls from people concerned about how such a system could come about, and that the company has decided to remove references to the idea in future to avoid confusion.
There has been recent confusion about the micropayment approach Bill Gates outlined that is important to clarify. Microsoft is absolutely not proposing charging every user money to send every email, the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added that: The financial micropayment idea remains in a hypothetical stage for the time being as implementation challenges… would obviously need to be worked through.
This confusion was probably caused by Microsoft executives, including Gates, repeatedly stating explicitly that the company was considering and/or already implementing the micropayments disincentive idea.
In his interview with USA Today a year ago, Gates said: There’s another thing that I talked about as long as eight years ago, that we’re still implementing, which the idea is if you want somebody to read an e-mail you would put up a certain amount of money.
As recently as February, the general manager of Microsoft’s anti-spam group, Ryan Hamlin, was touting micropayments as one of several strong challenge[s] to spam. The same month, Gates talked about asking senders to put a little bit of money at risk.
But the company has not backtracked on computational challenge, in which email-sending servers have to provide the recipient the answer to a mathematical puzzle before the email is accepted, as a way of making spam impractical.
This would involve an expenditure of computing time that would be trivial for most senders, but would cause a dramatic slowdown in spammers’ operations, given the massive volumes of email they send, Gates wrote in yesterday’s email.
Microsoft has been talking about this idea for over a year. Critics say that as most spam is currently sent from networks of compromised PCs, spammers already have the CPU power to handle computational challenges.
Instead of the micropayments idea, sometimes called ‘Penny Black’, Microsoft has thrown its weight behind ideas like Bonded Sender, a service from IronPort Systems Inc that holds monetary bonds on behalf of email marketers.
Under Bonded Sender, which Microsoft has adopted in its own email services, if an email sender breaks their pledge to conform to certain best practices, they lose their bond. It’s more about positive, rather than negative, reinforcement.
But Microsoft is not talking just about these economic disincentives. The company also is also planning upgrades to the anti-spam technology, SmartScreen, that it includes in Outlook, Exchange and Hotmail.
Gates said in his email yesterday that the company is developing ways to prevent dictionary attacks, ways for email administrators to block email from open proxies, and ways for admins to check outbound email for inadvertent spam.
