Sixty-five percent of the 100 billion e-mails sent every day are spam, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hari Balakrishnan.
"This is an arms race of us raising the fence and spammers jumping over it," he said.
Balakrishnan, however, believes he can prevent spam, and he shared his idea - using digital stamps to authenticate e-mails- with 30 faculty members and students yesterday at Levine Hall.
Balakrishnan seeks to fix existing mail filters' habit of deleting wanted messages along with spam.
His proposal would "decimate spam" by giving e-mails a monetary value so that it is not cost-efficient for spammers to send out billions of e-mails, he said.
According to Balakrishnan's calculations, having a fee of three dollars per one thousand e-mails, or 0.3 cents per e-mail, would be sufficient to significantly reduce spamming.
E-mail is currently valued at about 0.01 cents an e-mail, he said.
Professors at the event asked a number of questions about the feasibility of Balakrishnan's proposal.
According to Information Sciences professor Jonathan Smith, departments within the University are considering testing Balakrishnan's system.
The same will happen at MIT, Balakrishnan said.
Balakrishnan also suggested setting a quota of e-mail that a person can send per day.
Senders would require stamps to send their e-mails and would only have a certain number available for use. This quota would be set by a non-governmental organization.
Internet service providers would buy stamps and give each of their users the set amount. The cost of e-mail would be incorporated into monthly Internet subscription plans.
Balakrishnan said that most people send fewer than 100 e-mails a day, and that this cost would be negligible.
Anyone wishing to send more than their quota would need to buy extra stamps. The cost of stamps would inhibit spammers from sending out excessive amounts of e-mail.
Spammers could re-use stamps by hacking into "enforcer" computers that check a stamp's validity, Balakrishnan admitted. However, he said that as long as spammers could only control a minority of enforcers, the amount of spam would still decrease.
Balakrishnan said he does not expect his system to be implemented on a global level because Internet users in developing countries would not be able to afford to buy stamps and send e-mails.
Instead, Balakrishnan said that his method is better suited for organizations such as universities because it could increase e-mail's speed and reliability by skipping content filters that take time to process messages and can classify them incorrectly as spam.
