Yahoo Could Introduce Email Stamping to Reduce Spam

Yahoo masterminds have concocted a great idea to stop spam and help charity organizations around the Globe. The Internet giant is pondering introducing a digital version of the classical mail stamp for its emailing system.

The virtual stamp will cost approximately one cent and will be sold in packs of 500 for 5$. After acquisition, the customer could select the charity organization that will benefit from the money they paid for the “e-stamp,” helping others along the way.

This is not an old-fashioned, paid-membership emailing system, since Yahoo will be donating all the money, but it is for sure a great idea to reduce the number of spam-suspected emails that enter Yahoo's spam filter everyday.

Mails containing the stamp will just cruise through the Internet, while filters will concentrate all their efforts on detecting and blocking spam mails. If adopted, spam-prevention measures should increase their efficiency, since it's quite clear that spam sources will not have the funds to buy stamps for all their mails.

Usually, a regular spam robot or botnet sends around a million emails per day that will be 10,000$ in cash. Since the majority of spam is generated by people looking to make money, this solution will be further out of their reach than evading from a regular spam filter.

Spam already accounts for about 90% of all mails sent out on the Internet, making it harder and harder to open a mailbox without having to deal with some unwanted mail every day. The Yahoo project, named CentMail, proposes to develop a new protocol called Centmail that will handle “authentication of both emails and arbitrary text documents.”

In a statement from the CentMail Technical Paper, the project developers had this to say regarding the project's goal: “Most economic anti-spam approaches focus on penalizing senders, rewarding recipients, or both. [...] However this leaves senders with little or no reason to join and plenty of reason not to, especially with the prospect of black hats stealing their funds. Instead, we advocate the ‘sender pays charity’ variant that directly rewards senders regardless of what recipients do. CentMail begins as a charity fund-raising tool allowing senders to regularly donate to causes they care about and to promote those causes in their email signatures.”

CentMail signature sample: