Pay-Per-Email Plan to Beat Spam and Help Charity

Aug. 13, 2009— -- Yahoo! wants to reinvent the postage stamp to cut spam. Researchers are testing a scheme where users pay a cent to charity for each email they send – so clearing their inbox and conscience simultaneously.

You may see less spam these days, but it is more abundant than ever, making up more than 90 per cent of all email sent globally. Most is intercepted by anti-spam programs that filter mail by its origin or content.

Yahoo! Research's CentMail resurrects an old idea: that levying a charge on every email sent would instantly make spamming uneconomic. But because the cent paid for an accredited "stamp" to appear on each email goes to charity, CentMail's inventors think it will be more successful than previous approaches to make email cost. They think the cost to users is offset by the good feeling of giving to charity.

Some previous schemes, such as Goodmail, simply pocketed the charge for the virtual stamps. Another deterred spammers by forcing computers to do extra work per email; and Microsoft's version requires senders to decipher distorted text.

The problem with any such "economic" approach is that it costs money or effort for legitimate senders as well as spammers, Yahoo! researcher Sharad Goel explains. By passing the money onto a charity of the sender's choice, and showing the donation in a "stamp" at the bottom of every email sent, CentMail aims to make senders feel an altruistic glow to balance that perceived cost. That could also persuade people to sign up without waiting for the system to become widespread. "We think this is a more socially efficient approach to reducing spam," says Goel.