Does Bill Gates want a penny for every e-mail?

A friend forwarded an e-mail that claims Bill Gates wants to charge everyone a penny in “postage” for every e-mail message sent. Welcome to the world of urban legends, where the message is only casually related to the truth.

This is not an updated version of the ancient “US Postal Service 5-cent tax” urban legend. Nor is it related to the old “FCC Internet Tax” myth. The new story is a distorted and oversimplified summary of one of many proposals currently making the rounds to combat spam. Bill Gates mentioned it in a speech, but it’s not his idea nor is it at the top of Microsoft’s list of preferred solutions.

Under the most common variations of this type of plan, personal email would continue to be free, but bulk senders would be forced to pay a penny or so per message. In the idea that Gates has mentioned, any unidentified sender would be forced to offer a monetary amount for you to read an email. If you identify the person as a friend, there’s no charge, but a spammer would have to pay, conceivably as much as 20 cents per message that actually gets read. It’s a complicated idea and I doubt it will ever take off. Details are in this USA Today story.

An alternate proposal from Microsoft Research is called the Penny Black project. Under this scheme, message senders would have to pay a price in CPU cycles or some form of math challenge (which would be solved by the computer, not by the user!). This would result in an imperceptible slowdown for the average person, but would seriously impact someone cranking out thousands of messages a day.

There’s also a controversial proposal called the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which is designed to stop e-mails with forged “From” addresses; it works by checking the IP address of a message sender to determine whether it’s authorized to use the SMTP server from which the message was sent. A Microsoft version of that called “Caller ID.” You can read about it here.

Bottom line: Free e-mail is here for the foreseeable future. Any truly effective solution to spam is going to take a long time to implement, and it’s going to be fraught with unintended consequences. If someone tells you they have a foolproof solution, they’re trying to fool you.