Why Spam Might Be Good Nathaniel Borenstein Chief Scientist, Mimecast Like everyone else who has given it a moment's thought, I hate spam. Having worked on email technology for over 30 years, I probably hate it even more than most. But I've come to realize that, like other things I hate -- mortality, sickness, growing old -- there are silver linings if you look hard enough. The sad reality is that Moore's Law favors the spammers. If every two years the good guys halve the percentage of spam that gets through, the spammers can double the amount they send in the same timeframe. This means that spam fighters are forever running in place, devising new and better techniques just to make sure that spam doesn't get worse. They need to implement and improve filters, authentication techniques, statistical analyses, reverse Turing tests (CAPTCHAs), and more. But "running in place" is really innovating madly. Antispam efforts have already yielded useful improvements in text processing and authentication. Like the space program, spam-fighting has a tendency to spin off inventions with wider utility. So far, those innovations have been relatively small, because we're still exhausting the easiest approaches to fighting spam. Before long, however, we will run out of low-hanging fruit, and will need seek out ever more challenging antispam techniques, one of which has the potential to change the world. The use of economics to fight spam has long been discussed, but has yet to be put into practice due to a host of complexities. Economic approaches can be as simple as the postal model, in which you pay for each message you send, but hardly anyone wants that. Fortunately, a number of more sophisticated approaches are possible. The details won't fit here, but I assure you that all of these approaches are plausible in the real world. One approach, invented by Mark Wegman of IBM, is known as Charity Stamps. In this approach, each email you send has an electronic "stamp" verifying that you've donated a small amount of money to charity. Unless you're the kind of person who never gives to charity, you would simply make your regular charitable donations via the Charity Stamps service, so your email would be effectively free. Yet this would play havoc with the economics of spam. An even more intriguing approach is Attention Bonds, invented by Marshall van Alstyne of Boston University. An attention bond is a promise, certified by a cryptographic signature on a message, that if the recipient considers a message to be spam, then -- and only then -- the sender will pay a certain amount of escrowed money. Not only would attention bonds disrupt the economics of spam, they would make it reasonable to use email for the kind of marketing that continues to kill trees today. This is because a marketer could send a message to a list of prospects, with the expectation of up paying a certain amount for each unreceptive recipient. The marketers would have a tremendous incentive to promptly remove those people from their mailing lists, and could view thir payments as the cost of acquiring a list of willing recipients. Once a payment infrastructure is in place, all sorts of other innovations become possible. Celebrities might personally answer fan mail if it includes a $100 donation to the celebrity's charity. Consultants could have their fees attached to emailed questions. The possibilities are endless, and not limited to email. Our ongoing frustration with spam could be the impetus for a long-dreamed-of universal infrastructure for micropayments. In retrospect, that might even make all our struggles with spam worthwhile.