Anti-Spam Economic Measures

The cluster discusses proposals to combat spam by imposing costs like per-message fees, micro-payments, or proof-of-work on senders, making large-scale spamming unprofitable especially for email and online posts.

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Keywords

AFAIK e.g FB US CPU DNS stoptwitterspam.com www.sto HTTP mechanism.html spam spammers email sending cost mail smtp stamps costs scale

Sample Comments

nextn Mar 25, 2025 View on HN

Spammers are worse at something no one tried to use AFAIK: require a fee to deliver email.

Jansen312 Dec 18, 2021 View on HN

Payment. Every emailed sent needs a payment token. Maybe like a few cents similar to postage. If your reputations got screwed because doing spamish activities, rates go up cost say 1 dollar per email. Each sender must have verified account just like FB that maps to your national IDs. Over night spam will plunge. Of course getting this implemented across the world would be impossible. We could wage war with any countries that refuse to participate...just like any countires wishing to undermine US

ams6110 Oct 17, 2015 View on HN

Because spammers can't afford a couple of TB of disk space?

richdougherty Jul 24, 2018 View on HN

It's more costly so it probably changes the economics of spam.

rwmj Jul 3, 2024 View on HN

It actually adds some cost to the spammer, so that could be good.

tsukikage Feb 23, 2023 View on HN

“spam wouldn’t scale” - unconvinced on this: spammers already mostly use other people’s compromised machines to do the sending; there is no cost to them here.

pavel_lishin Sep 6, 2016 View on HN

Wasn't that one of the suggestions for removing spam, by having every email sent cost something (proof of work, receipt of payment, etc?)

nailer Mar 30, 2023 View on HN

It's a good strategy. Suddenly spam costs money.

jjtheblunt Apr 29, 2024 View on HN

why don't they fine them for delivering spam? like $1 per instance or something motivating?

dylan604 Mar 14, 2024 View on HN

They get paid to serve that spam. Why would they reduce the avenues to serve the spam?