What would you pay to send an email?

[MarvinisaLunatic]

Part of the article:

NEW YORK - If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit card offers, sweepstakes entries and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates (news - web sites), among others, is now suggesting that we start buying "stamps" for e-mail.

 

Many Internet analysts worry, though, that turning e-mail into an economic commodity would undermine its value in democratizing communication.

 

But let's start with the math: At perhaps a penny or less per item, e-mail postage wouldn't significantly dent the pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a day. Not so for spammers who mail millions at a time.

 

Though postage proposals have been in limited discussion for years — a team at Microsoft Research has been at it since 2001 — Gates gave the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum (news - web sites) in Davos, Switzerland.

 

Details came last week as part of Microsoft's anti-spam strategy. Instead of paying a penny, the sender would "buy" postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender's good faith.

 

Time is money, and spammers would presumably have to buy many more machines to solve enough puzzles.

 

Rest of the article

 

I think I know how this is going to go, but I figured instead of just posting an article about how stupid Bill Gates is, that Id post this poll.

 

I figured it wouldn't be long before someone would want to stick postage on email and make you pay for it. I figured it would be done by the Government/Postal Service. Having to pay for email would cripple email more than the spam does now. I can easily ignore the spam, delete it, filter it better. And the funny thing is, I still get a ton of junk mail in my real mailbox even though people have to pay to send mail (and thats even more expensive if you consider the cost of the paper/envelope and postage). People are still going to send spam even if they have to pay a penny per email. They probably won't send out a billion spam messages to random people, but they'll still send out a lot even if they have to pay to do it.

 

All this will do is cause more people to use IMs instead of emails (like a lot of people do now anyway). Of course, wait a while and there will be "postage" on IM messages as well.

[Guest El Satanico]

I wouldn't pay anything for email. Spam doesn't bother me that much. I can live without the small amount of mail I get, which is mostly jokes or chain mail from people I know.

 

Even if Microsoft does this, someone out there will still offer free email

[MrRant]

It probably won't happen.... HOWEVER you may see ISP's giving an certain amount of e-mails sent per month... say 100-500 and anything above that would cost a something like $1 per extra 100 e-mails since I don't think anyone sends 500 e-mails a month.

 

Wouldn't suprise me but I don't want that to happen as it's fairly simple to avoid spam.