The Armchair Politician

In the past few years, some people who have no clue about the actual technological makeup of the internet have purported a penultimate solution for stopping UCE and other forms of spam: charging for email. Despite the absolute absurdity of the idea, interest in various variations crops up every few months or so. It won’t work for several reasons, all of which are tightly related with each other.

Infrastructure

Ignoring the question of who will receive the money, we first have to figure out how to send the money. Here’s where one of the biggest problems arise. Firstly, this type of problem will require one of a few troubling solutions.

The most likely possible solution is the inclusion of support for financial transactions in the majority of email servers on the internet. Many people think this isn’t too big of a deal–how many servers can there be? Millions. ISPs aren’t the only people who store and deliver email. Many, many companies host their own email servers, and there are quite a few of us who host email out of our own homes. For instance, when you send email to me, it does not go to my ISP, Bellsouth. It goes directly to a server in my basement, where it is stored until I read it–Bellsouth never sees it. This alone is a massive task, that has many problems associated with it.

These financial transactions involve a significant amount of data and cryptography. Instead of just sending the body of an email, mail servers will also have to encrypt a piece of billable information and send it with the rest of the email. And unfortunately, despite our current state of processing power, secure levels of cryptography is not fast. Even worse, as processors become faster, we require stronger, more processor-intensive levels of cryptography. As it stands, encrypting a small piece of data takes, with a conservative estimate, at least twenty times the amount of processor cycles as sending the email itself. And this, in turn, means that current email infrastructure would be pushed at over twenty times its current amount. This will undoubtedly mean that companies will have to spend far, far more simply to handle their existing email traffic.

Security

Even worse, do you really trust the guy you send email to? Anyone can host their own email server, and it’s necessary for the system to remain that way, not to mention infeasible/impossible to change it. Well, you’re going to have to make sure that you have a strong belief in the honesty of the people you send email to–because along with your email, you’re sending billable information.

With cryptography, it’s possible to mitigate the possibility of another person accessing this billable information before sending it off to be redeemed. However, even the strongest cryptography can be broken, and many times there are flaws in the cryptographic protocols themselves. Recently, most implementations of SSL, the current standard for encrypting secure web sessions (usually used in online purchases), were discovered to contain a security flaw that could be exploited by anyone “listening” to these connections.

This was bad enough, but if it had happened with this type of email system instead, the results would have been catastrophic. Anyone with their own email servers could have used this vulnerability to open up the encrypted packet, and discovered the billable information inside, which would be credit card information, in most of the suggested implementations.

People familiar with cryptography can probably see many other massive flaws in this idea, such as the problems occuring if the private key to a billing company is leaked/discovered, but I’m not going to mention them here.

Transparency

Lastly comes transparency. This solution requires that nearly everyone switch over to this new, improved email system. After all, if people can send emails to the pay-for network without paying, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? An obvious solution is to allow people to decide when they will stop accepting the free emails. But is this really a solution? Imagine what this means: people will be paying for their emails without experiencing any benefit for a significant period of time. In fact, there would not even be a guarantee that the idea would even catch on. How many people do you think would be eager to pay for a service whose benefits won’t be realized for years, if at all?