A Penny Black for your thoughts?
It’s older than Eric Idle’s broadway musical Spamalot
It’s older than Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which Vikings sing the SPAM song. This song is the source for the name we use to describe unsolicited email. Unwanted email does not so much resemble the pink giggly canned meat as it does a Viking horde drowning out all other conversation with boisterous singing.
It’s older still than that potted meat product.
It’s more like Queen Victoria’s age:
Before 1834 most mail arrived postage due. Before the postage stamp, methods for figuring fees for delivering mail were complicated, most postage was underpaid by the sender, or the sender paid nothing at all. A postal customer on the receiving end would usually be left holding the bag on what is now known as “Unsolicited mail”.
The costs of email are borne by the recipient, it’s like a chatty buddy calling you up on your cell and burning through your anytime minutes with stories of late night escapades that you dearly hope are ficticious.
Because the initiator (sender) doesn’t pay a penny, a whole direct-email economy blooms, and infests your inbox. Unsolicited mail schemes can be profitable if only a tiny handful of truly desperate losers out of tens of thousands of recipients clicks through on an offer for \/|@GR@.
The original answer to the postage problem was Charge for the Stamp. Duh. The stamp pictured above is the original one penny stamp for prepaying postage in England.
The Penny Black Project at Microsoft seeks to reverse the economics of email and make the sender pay.
In typical big-company geek fashion with Redmond’s particular flair for arrogance they’ve skipped the obvious approach of a prepaid postage stamp bought with cash money. Concluding perhaps that since there aren’t coin slots on the beige box, or those little see-thru windows on the envelopes, or maybe they got hung up on making the stamp-licking part happen.
No, cash money is just too mundane for the ’softies on this research project. They’ve settled on computational puzzles as their form of economics. If you want to send an email, you have to execute puzzle code on your CPU that’s designed to spin away 10 seconds worth of processor resource. Hmmm. Make your computer say “Hmmm.” for 10 seconds.
Yes, if I want to get a message to you I’m willing to wait 10 seconds.
Yes, if I want to get a message to you I’m willing to put a 37¢ stamp on it.
Yes, if I want to get a message to you I’m also, therefore, willing to light said 37¢ stamp on fire.
The Penny Black Project sounds most like lighting that stamp on fire to me.
The CPU cycle paid postage sounds like a regressive tax on the poor, a boon to computer hi-jackers, and a scheme to waste away those CPU cycles.
Please, Microsoft, Please consider cash.
Make it a dime, payable to the reader. Senders pay, readers earn. Indiscriminate bulk senders go out of business. Savvy, knowledgeable marketers would trip all over themselves to deliver valuable information to qualified buyers for only a dime. If you like my message, you reply “Thanks.” and we’re even, email is free again.
When you’ve solved SPAM, could you get the junk out of my USPS mailbox?
