Spam Blocker Charges For Email

from the pay-to-play dept

Whenever the question of how to stop spam comes up, I hear someone say that adding a "payment" mechanism to spam would immediately reduce the quantity of spam. However, there are always problems with implementing such a system. Now, a new company is launching just such a system that to let people charge others to email them. Of course, it doesn't address most of the problems that are always discussed around such a solution - and seems to do some very questionable things in their implementation. It's really just a badly implemented version of a whitelist, that includes transaction fees. Since spammers don't respond to whitelist "confirmation" requests, why not just use whitelists instead? The way this system is set up, even your friends will need to pay each time they send you email - which isn't likely to create many happy friends. Furthermore, to make matters worse, the only way to pay someone to email them is to sign up for the service yourself. For that reason alone, I imagine that most people would never bother to send email to anyone using such a system. No matter what, any sort of micropayment system misses the point of email altogether - which is that it's a costless system on purpose. Adding fees would do more to damage email than the benefit found from slowing down spammers.

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