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Stop spam, charge to send emails?

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3 replies

by camjes

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Just a thought, reckon it would stop spam almost overnight, if ISPs/email hosts charge per x amount of email sent.
Genuine users who send a few/day aren't going to be charged much, ( I only average about 20 outside my LAN/day, I know there will be lots of people legitimately sending 5, 10 or 20 times that )but the junk senders plundering our mailserver/bandwidth/pc/time resources will be. If it starts costing $$ to send 10000 emails, it will be time to stop and think.
It would probably kill the free email services, but then thats where half the junk in my mailbox replies to anyway. I for one would be happy to have my internet access plans renegotiated to include numbers of emails sent.

3 replies

by oldefar

The charge for mail works because there is a government or quasi-government service in place for all to use. This established the concept of a sender fee, and today sets the rate and service that other services compete against. It is too late to replicate this approach on the Internet since so many of us would oppose more government involvement.

by finerobe

Hurray for a clean and simple solution.

If someone wants to send me a msg and its not worth 3rd class postage I don't want it.

Let the postage be credited to my ISP account and they can send it all day.

by thechas

Have you checked your snail-mail box lately?

If you mandate a charge for sending e-mails, it won't stop the spammers if they can get a bulk rate.

My greater concern is that a charge would bring an end to the free legitimate news letters that I subscribe to.

I don't want to see my favorite web sites become pay sites just so they can continue to send me the e-mails that I have subscribed to.

Except for 1 particular e-mail address that I use when I suspect that my address will be mis-used, I get a lower percentage of spam than I do junk mail.

While I would like to see an end to spam, remember that most spam is the fault of the recipient giving away their e-mail address in the first place.

Many "free" web services that require an e-mail address support themselves by selling those precious e-mail addresses to spammers.

If you really want to stop spam, stop using ANY free web service that requires your e-mail address.

Chas

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