CNN.com – Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail – Mar. 5, 2004
Does anyone else think that charging for email — now that we all have gotten use to it being free and ubiquitous — will be a good idea?
Interesting article with a variety of viewpoints, but I doubt this will work. The spammers have proven to be adaptable and more nimble than anyone could have expected. My guess is that when free email is outlawed, only outlaws will use free email. Trouble is, this plan purports to make it harder to send: why not find a way to make it more difficult to receive junk mail?
After all, they’ll just pass along the cost, and the more determined clients will continue to pay.
If the leading distributers of email software and services started pushing for digital signatures and verifiable IDs, and did a good job of integrating them into popular email client software, it would then be possible to filter out all unsigned mail, just as some services use “whitelists” now. As nimble as they are, I don’t know if the spammers can get verifiable IDs quickly enough to make their game pay.
And what about the people who pay the bills? It would be informative to collect the names and contact information from a reasonable large corpus of spam and see what the FTC and FCC think about that.