E-Mail Postage?

[filkertom]

Here's a fascinating thought:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/05/spam.charge.ap/index.html

The gist of it is, charging a minimal amount for e-mail -- say, a penny per -- and having the option of, say, a ten-second math quiz or something to "buy" e-pennies. Easy enough for you and I; not so easy for spammers, dealing with millions of e-mails at a pop.

I can see problems with people who have large mailing lists, but there should be some interim level of "purchase", or perhaps a certain amount free per month -- or perhaps like a calling plan, where you get a number of credits equal to the cost in pennies of your monthly online bill. That'd give me almost 4,000; I think I could get by with that. :) There's subscription -- f'rinstance, I subscribe to both comics.com and mycomics.com, $10 each per year, which easily includes the prospective penny per day.

Thoughts?

Comments

[clauclauclaudia]

I think that if we could integrate micropayments for e-mail into the existing infrastructure, that would mean we had the collective ability to eliminate spammers entirely. But apparently we don't.

How would you force ISPs to collect these payments? Why can't you force them to pull the plug on their spammers the same way?

[thingunderthest.livejournal.com]

One of the problems with Micropayments for such things is that it ads more commerce into the deal and you get into a collection issue. Unless you buy a large block of money to sit in your micro pay account you get screwed over by the credit card transaction fees.

Also this will require everyone to buy mail server software that can process the "stamps' and there would have to be either legislation to prevent people from putting up there own free server or the pay servers would be set to ignore unstamped email. That would be hellish in the transition period. You end up with the same scenarios of only accepting mail from people that are already in your address book. A lot of email you might want would never reach you.

[mneme]

I've heard it -- it's a variation on the (all bad) "Prove you love me" schemes, and worse than many since it involves actual (or pretend) money.

For the most part, spam may be a solved problem anyways -- we just don't know yet (spf + law enforcement should take care of the acountability issue in a big way).

But really, the issue -is- accountability -- you don't need a PYLM scheme to deal if you can trace spam back to its source, and by the same token, a PYLM scheme isn't going to help if person X is going to get charged for person Z's spam.

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

The short delay method is much preferrable to me as compared to paying money, ANY amount of money, for such a thing as a postage stamp for email. It is after all not paying for anything, merely acting as a kind of deterrant. It would deter more than just the spammers and indeed, I imagine smart spammers would manage to find a way around the payment, so it would be essentially just a misapplied annoyance in the end.

[(Anonymous)]

It just seems sketchy to me. Between the two, I'd be more open to the time-delay than actually paying money. But then, having had to send out about 50 individual e-mail messages acknowledging receipt of housing applications since last night (that's part of my job this time of year), any sort of deterrent could potentially be extremely annoying. There must be other options for stopping spammers.

-Marianna (aka Lady Omniscience from the old forums)