This might stop spammers, but....

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

Who really wants to have to pay to send email?

I think this won’t work for a lot of reasons. 1 major problem I see is what do you do about people who are unknowingly infected by a virus?

OMG IT’S AN IDEA BY BILL GATES, IT EVIL OGMMOGMOGOMGMOGMO

Meh, it’s a step in the right direction. At least they’re bouncing ideas around instead of sitting back and throwing out their “spam filters”

The only problem is that e-mail is international, whereas postage mail is contained within the nation. You can’t simply slap the entire world with a “Pay this much to send an email”. And how are you going to regulate people with their own mail servers?

I don’t like the idea, but to be honest I’m one of the lucky few who recieves minimal spam for some reason or another, so my opinion on the horrors of spam is somewhat moot.

Erm… no its not worth it. Paying for e-mails to avoid spam. No way.

Am I the only one who thought he looked like he was giving a sermon here? :thud: and as for a price tag on emails… well… nope. Ain’t gonna happen, I strongly doubt there’s a way to regulate EVERY email server in the world- especially ours. If Gates tried to fiddle with our server, our postmaster would probably piledrive him onto a server or something :thud:

I don’t think so.

An old idea that won’t pull through.

I doubt that charging for e-mail would be as painless for an average person as the article makes it out to be. A penny per e-mail, with three to four e-mails per day, comes to about $1 per month, so tack an extra dollar on to whatever your ISP costs.

It’s also significant that postage stamps, not very long ago, cost only a cent. If e-mail costs a cent now, it may as well cost two cents. And four cents isn’t that much higher than two, is it? Maybe this argument seems unrealistic, but how much do stamps cost now? About forty cents each? If you told people fifty years ago that they would have to pay forty cents to send a letter, they’d probably be indignant. If every e-mail cost me forty cents, or even four, I would stop using e-mail except when I had to. This defeats the point of preventing spam, doesn’t it? If, as a result, I barely use e-mail at all? I’m not a fan of the idea.

Xwing1056

Stopping spams? Nah, the real purpose of this is to get a new way to make money over the internet for ISP’s - and MS, since they’ll be all license, copyright and patent stuff happy.

The solution to this sort of thing is kinda obvious, and I wonder that people haven’t already implemented it:

Just have a little verification code each time you send an e-mail! Like Yahoo’s “Type the word you see into this box. This is to prevent automated sign-ups”. Just have that for every time you send an e-mail. It takes 2 seconds of your time, and if it stops automated sign-ups, it can stop automatic e-mail sends too.

I like that idea very much. I’d like to add another one: making emails something that would be easily traceable to their sources. Like, if I send an email, then the police must be able to know at which time I generated it and from where (phisical location, not just server) I sent it. So the cops could just go in there and spank the soul out of the spammer.

This suggestion is patently ridiculous for one reason only: A vast majority of spammers infect people’s machines with viruses that use those machines to do the spamming. So you’ve got an innocent mule whose Internet use has been lagging immensely lately, and he suddenly finds himself with a $3,000 Internet bill the next day. This doesn’t solve anything at all.

I was putting my hopes into making things traceable to the point where you could trace those viruses to their origins too.

Ever since I started the college search I’ve gotten assloads of spam. And not just college spam, penis enlargement stuff too.

-_-

I used to not get any at all.

Ren, if that were possible, it’d almost certainly be done by now and there’d be arrests all over the place. It’s a whole lot trickier than it sounds.

DUMB DUMB DUMB

Here’s why: no one wants to pay for it, and spammers don’t follow laws anyway, so who cares.

All this will do is suck more money from people via the web.

Originally posted by Bing
[b]DUMB DUMB DUMB

Here’s why: no one wants to pay for it, and spammers don’t follow laws anyway, so who cares.

All this will do is suck more money from people via the web. [/b]
The idea is that you have to pay before sending it out Bing. It’s not like people shove 100 letters in a mailbox without postage and they still get delivered.

Originally posted by Xelopheris
The idea is that you have to pay before sending it out Bing. It’s not like people shove 100 letters in a mailbox without postage and they still get delivered.
I could send you a letter without paying for it (assuming I broke the law, of course). “Postage Paided by…” whatever those big companies use. There will be a way around it, and it will be used by spammers, if this actualyl goes thru, but I hope it wont.