A new technology being researched by Microsoft aims to raise the cost of sending spam to a degree that would make it of little value to would-be spammers.
This comes hard on the heels of statements by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, where he vowed to end spam and even predicted its demise within a few years.
Reuters reports that Microsoft is working on a research project named "Penny Black" - the name is derived from an 1830s stamp that reversed the cost of postage to the sender, rather than charging the letter recipient - that will make it expensive to send mass mailings.
Today it costs as much to send a million e-mails as it does to send one, and while Microsoft`s project will not incur a monetary cost, it nonetheless aims to make spammers pay.
"The general idea is to force the sender of an e-mail to incur some kind of cost," says Cynthia Dwork, a senior Microsoft researcher.
"In this case, the currency is computational, as the Penny Black project would require an e-mail sender`s computer to spend about 10 seconds solving a complex mathematical problem and then attaching proof of the effort to a message."
She says that while this would not amount to too much computation time for users who send anywhere from a few to several dozen e-mails daily, it would mean that spammers who send millions of messages would have to buy racks of computers.
A similar model that is also being considered is the "challenge-response" scenario, whereby an e-mail recipient would require the sender to answer a question in order to accept a message.
The company believes that the biggest hurdle to implementing Penny Black or a similar concept would lie in getting broad-based deployment across the e-mail system, as the technology would have to be built into software programs in sufficient numbers to have any real effect.
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