Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Spams and fraud in e-mail

E-mail is free - and because it is free, it has been abused in the following ways:

  • Spam emails on advertising products
  • Fraud, e.g. MLM, ponzi scheme or taking money and disappear
The spams and fraud are getting rampant and more sophisticated. There are three ways to deal with this problem:

  • Declare these activities to be illegal and take action against the spam or frauds. Although it is difficult to enforce, at least it will deter some people.
  • Require the sender of each e-mail to donate (say) 2 cents to a charity. The paid mail will be marked and recipients can opt to receive only paid mail, i.e. reject free mail. This requires the email community to adopt a standard for paid mail.
  • Continue the current situation and ignore the spam.
Which approach do your prefer? Give your vote in this survey.

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1 comment:

  1. COMMON CENTSMarch 09, 2011 4:59 PM

    Option 1 and 2 maybe technically feasible but even if so i guess may be very costly and the benefit may not outweigh very much the costs and effort. Many years ago there was a hoax email circulating widely, purportedly from Microsoft saying that for every email forwarded Bill Gates will donate $x to charity. IT experts came out and say it is technically not feasible to track forwarding emails for donation purposes.

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