Make Sure Your Organization Is Compliant With the Coming Puzzle Solution Requirements For Email

Bill Gates promises that all spam will be stopped cold by 2006. This will be accomplished by requiring all outbound email to perform a 10-second "puzzle" calculation that proves the sender is acting in good faith. It's like postage, but you pay in CPU cycles, not real money. (See details at http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/ )

The result is that your existing mail server (the machine in your organization that sends your email) will be significantly slowed. Today, you can likely send 100,000 emails per hour. Under the puzzle solution, you will be able to send only 360 emails per hour.

If you have a list of 100,000 subscribers, it will take you eleven days to send your email. For many organizations, this speed is unacceptably slow.

The Solution? There are Two:

1. Build your own in-house email server farm. A farm of 10 machines could send 3,600 emails per hour, or over 86,000 emails per day. Arial Software will soon be offering the software needed to run puzzle solution farms. You buy your own servers and license the software from us, and you can scale it to any number of servers.
2. Outsource your email to another company like Arial Software. We are building a 100-server puzzle calculation farm that can run the calculations and send up to 36,000 emails per hour.

If you're involved in online publishing, email marketing, online retailing, customer service activities or other activities that involve large volumes of email, it is critical that you stay up to date on this issue.

How Could The Puzzle Solution Actually Become Reality?

1. Microsoft is part of a consortium of the big ISPs: AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink, MSN. This big consortium has a very large financial incentive to stop spam because they are spending tens of millions of dollars each year wading through it.
2. Almost everyone who sends email sends mail to these four destinations. (All corporations, email marketers, etc.)
3. The puzzle solution is currently being discussed as one of the anti-spam proposals by the Big Four ISPs. If the Big Four ISPs choose to adopt the puzzle solution and announce a date beyond which they will stop accepting non puzzle stamped emails (say, January 1, 2005), then suddenly every corporation or email marketing organization in the world realizes they must be puzzle solution compliant by January 1 or none of their outbound mail will get delivered to the Big Four ISPs.
4. The IT dept. of most other organizations will also realize that if they, too, adopt the puzzle solution policy of the Big Four ISPs, they can eliminate all incoming spam on January 1. So this is an incentive for them to adopt the puzzle solution compliance policy, too.
5. Email software developers (developers of all SMTP and POP software) will see this happening and realize they have to release puzzle solution compliant software updates sometime in 2004 or risk their users switching to competitors' products. So this creates an incentive for these software developers to make their SMTP and POP software puzzle solution compliant.
6. On January 1, 2005 (example), all non-puzzle email starts bouncing from the Big Four ISPs. Spam is stopped cold. Legitimate email senders whose email also bounces realize they need to get with the program and get puzzle solution compliant, too. From here, it's a rapid ripple effect of compliance. Critical mass has been achieved. Spam as we know it becomes part of history.

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