by
Martel Firing
The Case for Stamped Mail
It is possible to have spam-free correspondence over the internet. It is also surprisingly easy. The secret ingredient is stamped, verified mail. If you and your correspondents UseBestMail, then all of your mail will be transmitted and received in what appears to be a spam-free channel. This is because the economics of spam won't stand the delay or pay discipline of UseBestMail. And best of all, it is free for non-commercial users.
Here is how it works. When you send stamped mail the UseBestMail software on your computer gets a special stamp from a computer operated by UseBestMail. The coded content of this stamp and the intended recipient's address are saved on the stamp-server computer. When your email is received a message is sent back to the UseBestMail computer by the recipient's software and the stamp is validated. This tells the recipient of your email that he has received a good email message.
There are only two ways to get email stamped. The first method is the free method, just UseBestMail to send out your messages. The reason that spammers can't use it like you do is that as the number of messages sent increases, a delay, starting very small and growing, is added to each stamp transaction. To send a few emails you'll hardly notice. But to send thousands will take all day, or even several days.
The second way to get stamps is to pay for them. A commercial user who wants to communicate with suppliers and customers in a spam-free environment is charged five cents per stamp, a fraction of the cost of mailing a letter or making a phone call. Also, paid senders don't experience the delay. Obviously, paying for stamps is uneconomical for spammers, who depend on a zero-cost channel.
The Spin-up Problem
When this venture was little more than an idea my brother pointed out, rightly, that there would be what he characterized as a "spin-up problem." By that he meant that until a lot of people use stamps it would be hard to get anyone to use them. Others have made similar observations about this chicken-and-egg dilemma. However, being a crazy optimist I ignored them all and went right ahead, confident that solutions could be found. And they have been.
Affinity Groups
The whole world does not have to participate for stamps to be useful. For example, suppose most of your correspondence is with members of a club, organization, business group, etc. Wouldn't it be nice to have their mail segregated into a separate folder? Wouldn't it be great for anyone joining the group to automatically have a spam-free channel to anyone else in the group? If you use eBay, for example, wouldn't it be nice not to be digging important correspondence out from the junk pile? Of course it would. Your group can UseBestMail.
Dedicated addresses
Many if not most internet service providers (ISP's) make it possible for you to have multiple email addresses. With UseBestMail it's easy to reserve one of your addresses as a completely spam-free channel and use another for general correspondence and spam digging.
Whitelist
To meet objections that UseBestMail will initially block or at least redirect mail from senders such as newsletters and friends unable or unwilling to UseBestMail we've provided the whitelist. The address of any mail you send out is stored in the whitelist and you'll be able to receive mail back from any such address. You can also manually add email addresses such as newsletter publishers to your whitelist. A list of blocked or suspect mail is maintained so you can convert a blocked address to a whitelist address with a mouse click. What could be easier?
Challenge/Response
You may want to accept mail from completely unknown sources. For example, if you run an employment agency you'll receive lots of resumes from strangers, and you don't want them thrown out as spam the way many filters tend to do. The solution to this problem is the Challenge/Response system (CR). The idea behind CR is to differentiate mail from live people from that sent by spammers' robots. Also, most spams don't have working return addresses. So we send a "challenge" message, an automated email back in response to non-validated email. If the sender is a human, he is asked to pass a little test from the UseBestMail web site that only a human can perform. Once this test is passed, the "response" to the challenge is returned, the questionable email address is added to the whitelist, and the original email is delivered as if nothing stood in its way. All of this occurs automatically.
Preview
There may be cases where, either you don't want to wait for a response to be returned, or perhaps you're expecting a message from a non-human source, such as a sales receipt from a web site. For this there is a Preview feature that lets you examine mail held back on the mail server and lets you override UseBestMail's handling instructions. For example, you can force download of a message or force it into the whitelist with a mouse click.
Rent a Mailbox
Leaving no excuse to not UseBestMail, a mailbox rental is available. This provides stamped mail services for everyone through web mail, WAP and Blackberry. For those using Apple or Linux the mailbox service provides POP3/SMTP service. Messages between mailbox accounts are free of charge. Outgoing messages are stamped and all non-stamped incoming mail is rejected outright. This system also demonstrates the commercial STMP module, which it uses.
Word of Mouth
Notwithstanding the technical patches described above, the ultimate solution to the spin-up problem is old-fashion word or mouth. If I get my friends to UseBestMail stamps and they tell their friends, and all of us encourage commercial mailers to do the same, before long we'll all participate in a stamped, verified, spam-free email system. And that's the goal.
The Alternatives
This essay is not a survey of all competing anti-spam methods, but the discussion wouldn't be complete without some discussion of alternatives. I'll keep this at a philosophical level rather than delve into technical merits and flaws of individual methods.
The first thing one has to realize is that if any single alternative or combination were completely effective there would be no spam problem. But there is a problem, which means that every method has its limitations. The main limitation of existing methods, including the patch-methods (whitelist & CR) we use, is that they try to block spam where it is received. None of these alternatives prevents spam from being sent nor changes the economics of the spam business. UseBestMail stamps do both. That is the fundamental difference between UseBestMail and the alternatives.
Another major difference between UseBestMail and the spam-blockers is that the latter must censor the mail by its content. Some are achieving admirable success from a technical viewpoint, but only at the cost of constant tweeking as the spammers tweek their own content. Thus, it shares characteristics with guerilla warfare. Nobody wins for long.
Conclusion
We can all enjoy good email. It isn't and will never be an instant and effortless transition from today's conditions. Stamped email provided by UseBestMail is a realistic and workable solution. It is available right now. Unlike any alternative it stops spam from being sent and changes the economics of the spam industry. Compared to the alternatives, it is positive, easy, inexpensive, and compatible with existing infrastructure. So why not give it a go?