Microsoft Corp has declared war against spammers by raising the cost of spam for spammers with a new technology targeting the low barrier to sending mass messages.

Currently, it costs virtually the same amount to send one message as it does one million. In a research project called "Penny Black", Microsoft is looking at ways to make it difficult for spammers to do mass mailing for quick money.

"The general idea is to force the sender of an e-mail to incur some kind of cost," said Cynthia Dwork, a senior researcher based at Microsoft's Silicon Valley facility.

An e-mail sender's computer would be required to spend about 10 seconds solving a complex math problem and attaching proof of the effort to a message, Dwork said.

For most users sending anywhere from a few to several dozen e-mails daily doesn't amount to too much computation time. Spammers who send millions of messages, however, would have to buy racks of computers.

"The currency in this case is computational," Dwork said.

By: DocMemory
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