Instead, the individual phone companies will continue to hold records of the senders, recipients, times and lengths of phone calls, information they already generate.
Last week the department issued an appeal to would-be senders of those articles of use and fancy which have become an indispensible adjunct to the celebration of the 14th, requesting them to post their missives as early as possible, Saturday night being recommended as the most convenient time.
Its idea, says Richard Gingras, its boss, is to create "a new, trusted class of e-mail from volume senders" which recipients would instantly spot as such in their inboxes.
Thus, says Mr Gingras, Goodmail's system would reduce (though not eliminate) spam, even if it is adopted only partially.A different approach is not to charge senders for every message upfront, as Goodmail will, but only for those that lead to complaints from recipients, and in arrears.
End-to-end encryption, in which senders encrypt messages on their own computers using a standard like PGP (or its open-source equivalent, GPG), has been around for more than two decades.
Next week, it expects to announce that many of the best-known senders of non-spam bulk e-mail have signed up, along with the big Internet service providers, to its bonded-sender programme.
The idea, simply, is that, if the price of sending spam rises, less of it will be sent.Servers fitted with IronPort's spam-recognition system will be able to identify "bonded senders" by their web addresses, and can block senders that are not bonded.
Its new anti-spam system also uses economic intuition, by requiring senders of e-mail to state clearly whether they are sending spam, and to back that statement with their own money in the form of a bond that will be forfeited if it turns out that they are lying.
"I have never had any dealings with Messrs Gabriel," thundered one of them, "and beg to know by what right do they disturb me by a telegram which is simply the medium of advertisement?" The Times helpfully reprinted the offending telegram, providing its senders with further free publicity.This was, notes Matthew Sweet, a historian, the first example of what is known today as "spam".
In 2001 the Patriot Act allowed pen/traps to be served on internet-service providers (ISPs) as well, where they reveal e-mail senders and recipients, the size of each e-mail sent and received, the IP address with which a computer communicates and the sites visited while browsing the web.
TransferWise, for example, is able to charge such low fees because it matches senders to recipients in the host and destination countries.
