In the May 2004 issue of Discover magazine, an innovative concept was
introduced by a woman who is an engineer with Microsoft.  It basically
involves forcing a calculation to be performed prior to releasing an
email.  The calculation would involve the from/to email addresses,
pieces of content, and a variety of other aspects unique to the
sending device.  The calculation would iterate so that it would result
in a delay of 10 seconds.  While a small delay would be harmless to
the vast masses of email users, to spammers it would slow their
operations to a snail?s pace ? estimated to be about 8,000 per 24-hour
period.  In order to achieve higher delivery volumes, they would need
to purchase additional machines.

My question is: Could this work?  My thinking is that there is a great
variety of devices, from palm devices to mainframes, and many
in-between, that can send email.  To work, the operating system for
each would need to be ?updated.?  Even then, ?old? machines could be
retained to bypass this.  For every lock there is a key and nowhere is
this more true than with computer programs.  Can you think of how this
Dvorak Protocol can be compromised?

Hi,

I'am geussing your talking about Black Penny?

http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/

Well since the system is not live, it's hard to tell. However when you
send EMAIL it goes to the server. Let say GMail (Googles upcoming
EMAIL) imagine 5,000 hitting send at the same time (very modist) That
would creat an exceptional load on the server. So in all reality, I
dont think it will ever go live.

Side Note: It's possable that a EPU (EMAIL Processing Unit) could be
built that does these calculations very quickly!


CIAO

X

To CIAO (xeno555-ga): Thanks for your comment.  It was very
informative and effectively answers my question.  The answer is a
"yes, but..." like many things dealing with computers.  However, I'm
confident that as the cost (of dealing with spam) rises, alternatives
will increase and the vast masses of us will benefit in the long run.