Charity Begins at… your Mail Program
Peter G. Capek, Barry Leiba, Mark N. Wegman
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center,
Hawthorne, NY 10532
{capek, barryleiba, wegman}@us.ibm.com
Scott E. Fahlman
Carnegie Mellon University
Computer Science Department
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Summary:
There are many methods introduced in the industry to minimize the spam mails or junk mails. One of which is asking the sender of an e-mail to pay the recipient just to prove that the sender is not a spammer. And this study introduces another technique, “charity seals” which means that the money you spent will be donated to the charity, and most legal users would not mind dong it and the money they will be spending is for a good cause.
The primary interest of the study is more on the e-mail involving the users which are not familiar or do not even know each other. Nowadays, the information about the sender is usually not confirmed or not verifiable at all and these would result to the spam problems.
The study also introduced number of approaches of solving the problem of spam e-mails and comparing it to the “charity seals”. One of those is the one-time-use or “passworded”-e-mail address idea. Also, there are many authors that promote “sender pays the recipient” schemes that suggest the exchange of money. The idea in here is that, if the sender is caught as a spammer, the recipient can collect the money; otherwise, the recipient will return the money to the sender. The thought in here is just to determine whether the sender is a spammer or not. Another approach is using CAPTCHA (“Completely Automated Public Turing test for telling Computers and Humans Apart”) scheme. The primary intention of this scheme is the idea that any human can answer the CAPTCHA easily and would be difficult or impossible for the computers.
Also, included in the paper that Fahlman and Wegman have proposed another approach, it is the “sender pays charity” in which the idea of the “charity seals” have taken. The idea is similar to the “Christmas seals” in which it has been used by the United States for quite some time now. Since Christmas is the only time that people will send large amounts of conventional mail. The idea is, these seals are distributed by a charity (using paper mails) with a solicitation for a contribution. The sender will only use the seals if he/ she will make a contribution to the charity that issued the seals.
The idea of the “charity seals” is the same as with the one stated above, the exchange of money and the electronic version of the seals. The only difference is that it tightens the combination; the seals are not reusable and not forgeable.
How it is done? At first the sender will choose what specific charity which he will donate the money. Then, an agency collects donations on behalf of the charities. The agency operates an Internet service which supplies to the donors a custom-created seal which the sender can include in his e-mail. The seal is essentially a document containing at least the recipient’s identity, an amount of money donated and a unique number – perhaps a time stamp – and the sender’s identity. It is digitally signed by the agency, and is proof that the sender has made a qualifying donation to a participating charity. Effectively, the agency keeps an account for each contributor and debits it whenever a seal is issued.
If the task is giving money, the system requires a connection with some banking system. Typically this would be done using a credit card. Senders probably do not want to give credit cards out to everyone they send mail to, and most recipients are not set up to take credit cards. Financial institutions do, however, have the idea of escrow accounts. The notion of escrow is that one person puts money into an escrow that is trusted by both parties, and they agree to terms under which the money would be released to one or the other party. This makes it much easier to handle payments when one party could disappear.
One way to achieve the advantages of a central server when the task is delivery of money is to have the sender establish an escrow account for each recipient. If the recipient votes the mail as spam within some pre-established time limit, the money is paid (that is, the task is performed). Otherwise it is returned to the sender. If the time limit expires, before the recipient reads the mail the system has the options of assuming that if the sender was willing to risk the money it is probably legitimate mail, or of not delivering the mail to the actual person until money is placed back in the escrow account.
There are many approaches in addressing the problem of spam mails and one of which is the “charity seals”. This would make the cost of mail low to those who are legal users and making it expensive to the spammers.
Evaluation:
It is true that spam mails do really exists and does contain problems. There are many people who have been victims of the spammers. I think, the awareness of the people about this problem should be the number one that should be addressed into. With regards to the study, it’s a good idea that they have introduced this kind of approach since giving money to charities is a good cause though you spend a little money. I think, they’ve introduced the idea but with respect to the implementation of the said methodology are still missing.
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