[extropy-chat] Email Postage

[Brian Lee]

The whole pay thing has problems because it kills many free email services. 
If someone is paying and collecting n cents per email, then there must be 
payment processing infrastructure in place to run. That now complicates all 
small projects as they must go through a pay service to send (and even 
receive email). So now open source projects must add credit card processors, 
etc to be able to send emails from sourcefourge.

The pay systems are bad because they impose a worse evil than spam: pay 
email. I would rather deal with spam than pay for any emails.

I've used hotmail for almost 10 years and I rarely get spam (maybe one per 
month). I have filters set up that prevent all the stupid \/iagra adds from 
getting through.

I think that AOL and Yahoo are more interested in email postage not as a 
spam prevention but to save money from trying to stop spam and to make 
revenue from direct emailers.

Right now AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail all spend a lot of time updating 
blacklists and whitelists and stuff like that. If they can "solve" the 
problem by using email postage then they can stop fighting spam on other 
fronts and just make customers enable email postage checking.

I think there are better ways to minimize spam without foisting a payment 
plan on top of email.

BAL

>From: Robert Bradbury <robert.bradbury at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Email Postage
>Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 12:43:11 -0500
>
>Well some of the ideas seem reasonable.
>
>How about:
>1) No charge for "friends", i.e. people from my address list.
>2) No charge for people to whom I have sent mail (but may not be in the
>address list).
>3) A "Commercial" Inbox for paid-for-mail and/or a "Priority" inbox for
>people willing to pay to send stuff "Express".
>4) After that apply the "standard" filters so that things that look like
>SPAM go into the SPAM inbox/folder/category and the rest goes into a
>ToBeSorted category.
>
>I don't think I even see the spam on Gmail and in ~5+ months of using it 
>off
>an on have only received perhaps 3 Spam messages.  (Of course my address
>hasn't been available in "public" for very long.)  But this would seem to
>imply that the filters used by the larger email suppliers are pretty robust
>at this point.
>
>The system above would seem to be reasonable in allowing people who really
>want to reach you to be able to pay to do so without inflicting a "time"
>cost upon you.  (I.e. the people with nothing better to do can sort through
>the junk mail and the people who are busy doing useful stuff will just
>circular file it.)
>
>Robert


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