‘CentMail’ to benefit charities, harm spammers.
Online giant
Yahoo!
has launched a website to give a charitable twist to the old idea of combating spam by making senders pay a small price for every email they send. The project, dubbed
CentMail
in a pun on the popular mail agent
sendmail
, lets senders voluntarily donate US$0.01 to a charity of their choice for every outgoing email.
As one of the reasons why spam is successful is that it is very cheap to send very large amounts of email, many have suggested that one way to solve the spam problem would be to require senders to pay a ‘postage’ fee for every email they send. However, experts have generally
been sceptical
about the possibility of implementing such a solution.
The reactions to
Yahoo!
‘s initiative have mainly been sceptical too, but while
Yahoo!
claims the idea is purely in the research realm, the company says it wants to use it to “learn about potential ways to put a dent in spam”.
The
CentMail
website, which has a long list of FAQs as well as a technical paper is
here
, while comments from
Sophos
can be found
here
and from
Avira
here
.
Posted on 21 August 2009 by
Virus Bulletin
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