It’s official. You’re invited! The March MMOOS (Maine Macintosh Owners and Operators Society) meeting will be held this coming Tuesday night, February 16th. It’s at 7:00 PM in the multi-purpose room at Brunswick High School. We’ll swap tips, make new friends, and smugly gloat about all the stuff Windoze users have to put up with that we don’t.

One thing we do have to put up with, just like those on “The Dark Side”, is spam. Although our Macs can’t be co-opted by a virus or worm and turned into a “spam factory”, we do end up on the receiving end like everyone else.

Last week Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates joined a chorus of other experts suggesting that the way to combat spam is to require using a “stamp” to send an email. Here’s the rationale: if the USPS delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would be overflowing with even more credit-card offers and hardware and grocery store fliers than we already get. Since email is free, spammers have no monetary incentive to limit the breadth of their “expression of First Amendment Rights”.

Some email stamp proposals don’t involve directly billing the sender for cash. One idea, already in limited use, is for email providers (or end users) to only allow incoming mail that bears a stamp in the email header. In order for a sending computer to generate this stamp, it must perform a minor mathematical operation. This slight delay in transmission wouldn’t affect “normal” users, but it could severely hamper spammers to the point they’d have to buy more, faster machines.

Others ideas deal in cash. If one had to pay, say, a fifth of a cent for every email sent, it certainly wouldn’t be a financial hardship for the millions of people who send only a few messages a day. However, it would add up a to a big bill for spammers who send millions of emails at a time.

Just the fact that Gates and Microsoft are involved in this makes me leery. Seems like us legal, normal folks would end up paying, and the spammers would find a way to circumvent the system. And it’s not hard to figure out who would end up selling us these stamps – my only question is, would the stamps bear a profile of Mr. Gates looking left, or right. I hear his left side is his best.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski