Charge to send email, and stop spam and help the planet.

[barts]

In my view, it's time to charge a small amount to send an email. This is not a new idea, or my idea, it's one that's been raised since the invasion of spam.

See a recent opinion piece in The Prospect, We need and email tax which argues, in part, that:

Some 200bn junk emails are sent daily. More than 40bn come from the US and Canada, and about 6bn from Britain. Estimates vary, but the best guess is that more than 90 per cent of all email is spam.

What causes this stupefying supply for which there is no apparent demand? The answer is simple: sending an email is free. ... Spam is used to spread viruses and sell fake or fraudulent goods. Moreover, there is an increasing risk that spam will make legitimate email a form of second-class post.

Over at techdirt, similar views:

...frustrating spammers by disrupting their services and raising costs, as well as trying to hold down responses even more, could diminish the profitability of spam to the point where it's no longer attractive.

And lastly, an ecological rationale for charging for email and purging the Internet of spam: Stop spam and save planet from greenhouse gases

Charging for each email, even less than one cent per message, would quickly make most spam unviable, according to Coroneos, but consumers have shown little willingness to pay for a service they have always considered free.

I am in favor of charging for email. It seems ludicrous to me that email is free, or that a service is the same price for someone who sends one email per month or sends 100 million. A one cent or half cent charge would eliminate most spam, and give legitimate email direct marketing companies a more responsive group to email to.

Is there any practical or rational or legitimate economic reason for not charging to send an email? I don't think so.

[gallo]

So, even if my government taxes me and my friends to use email, what is to prevent someone in Nigeria or India from spamming me?

And, of course, creating a huge government bureaucracy to administer who is allowed to send email and who is not, and to decide what you are allowed to say in your emails is clearly the answer to the problem. Somehow I'll bet that this bureaucracy will "pay for itself."

[barts]

So, even if my government taxes me and my friends to use email, what is to prevent someone in Nigeria or India from spamming me?

And, of course, creating a huge government bureaucracy to administer who is allowed to send email and who is not, and to decide what you are allowed to say in your emails is clearly the answer to the problem. Somehow I'll bet that this bureaucracy will "pay for itself."

Just like with regular mail, if someone in Nigeria wants to offer you a share of some general's $250 million in stolen gold, they'll have to pay the 1 cent or 1/2 cent fee or their message won't be delivered to our in-box.

There's no question about "who" can send email, just as there are no issues about who can send regular mail. You pay your postage and mail. Also, there's no issue about email content. Where did you get that idea from? It was not, and has never been--suggested in any discussions that I've read about charging people to send email.

The issue is one of making it economically unviable to spam, which is based on "free" email. Even a 1/2 cent charge would make an email phishing scam financially untenable.

A closing thought. Why should the money I pay for my Internet service subsidize spammers? They're free-riding on legitimate Internet users.

[SoylentGreen]

barts
The issue is one of making it economically unviable to spam, which is based on "free" email. Even a 1/2 cent charge would make an email phishing scam financially untenable.

There are countries that do nothing now to stop internet spammers, fraudsters and other con men. Theses countries are not likely to want to charge people for sending spam.
Now i know america has a habit of just sending it's army into countries it doesn't like and that is what it will have to do if they want to charge for the sending of spam.

Far more easier to charge the person who is recieving the spam, at least that part happens within the country, where as sending spam can happen from anywhere.

I think the wrong person will end up geting to pay the bill.

[Praxius]

I don't agree with charging people for sending emails, mainly because most email service providers exist simply because they are free.

Charging people to send emails won't solve the problem.... it may reduce it, but it's only going to harm those who use the service as it is meant to be used.

Secondly, where would my money be going? Who gets my taxed money from my emails? What services or programs would they be helping out?

Thirdly..... download a spam blocker or use the spam blocker in your email..... or simply don't open emails from people you don't know.... problem solved and nobody needs to be charged a cent.

It doesn't seem practical and runs along the lines of charging someone per web page they visit.

All this will do is increase the pirate community and third party web service providers who loophole the system.... or new programs will be created that block your computer from sending information that you visited any web page or sent any email..... thus avoid being charged for anything.

And if charging people more then what they're already being charged by their ISP's, I'd promote and help those with these programs to fight this sort of crap.

Spam is a mere inconvenience at best which can already be blocked/controlled..... I see no justification for taxing people.

If people open these things up and get a virus, or spyware, or they send their credit card info to someone they shouldn't.... that's not my problem and that's their own idocy in which they'll simply have to learn from.

When I first came onto the internet with my super powerful 33.6k dial-up modem, I had to learn the hard way.

[barts]

There are countries that do nothing now to stop internet spammers, fraudsters and other con men. Theses countries are not likely to want to charge people for sending spam.
Now i know america has a habit of just sending it's army into countries it doesn't like and that is what it will have to do if they want to charge for the sending of spam.

Far more easier to charge the person who is recieving the spam, at least that part happens within the country, where as sending spam can happen from anywhere.

I think the wrong person will end up geting to pay the bill.

Just like regular mail, if an emailer hasn't paid the "postage" the mail is not delivered. Any country could set up a regime whereby mail that arrives at any local ISP without payment being made is bounced. If a Nigerian sends you letter with no stamps, the US Postal Service doesn't deliver it.

The fact that all email addresses are a matter of record on various national servers (it's what makes the Internet work), adding an extra "postage paid" designation on the header would be pretty straightforward.

As for charging the receiver of spam, the old CompuServe service tried that. They charged 50 cents for every message received. As most messages were spam, and it wasn't possible to ascertain that without opening the message, it became ridiculous paying for something unsolicited and unwanted. I cancelled my CompuServe service. Those were early Internet days so messages where few.

For all practical purposes, the United States controls the Internet. It could unilaterally decide to charge for email. What it would do with money is a question.

Statistics, extrapolations and counting by Radicati Group from August 2008 estimate the number of emails sent per day (in 2008) to be around 210 billion. 183 billion messages per day means more than 2 million emails are sent every second. About 70% to 72% of them might be spam and viruses. The genuine emails are sent by around 1.3 billion email users. [Source]

Let's assume charging 1/2 cent gets rid of most the spammers and reduces some email. It's fair to assume, then, that every day about 63 billion emails would be sent. At 1/2 cent each, that's $315 million per day in charges or about $115 billion per year. (Someone might want to check my math.)

Let's put the $115 billion each year into global Internet infrastructure improvements so that everyone has superfast service into the home. See Coming soon: superfast internet.

If paying 1/2 cent to send an email gets rid of spammers and gives me an Internet connection 10,000 times faster than the one I have now, let me pay the 1/2 cent.

[barts]

Spam is a mere inconvenience at best which can already be blocked/controlled..... I see no justification for taxing people.

Spam is far more than "a mere inconvenience". See Bouncebacks: The Hidden Cost of Spam, High Cost Effects of Spam on Business, The Economics of Spam, and The True Cost of Spam.

As for taxing people, what I'm suggesting is that people pay for a service, just as they pay for a phone call, a text message, a fax, or a letter. That's not a tax; it's a fee for service. I'm not sure where you got the tax notion.

Why should I, for example, subsidize you or spammers sending emails? Why should I subsidize people who send billions of emails? As for regular business and regular people (not spammers) a small charge would not be onerous for most people or businesses. A 1/2 cent charge for me, for example, would cost about 10 cents per day. I spend 50 to 100 times that every day on my landline and my cell phone. My ISP could discount my bill by that much and it would be a wash. But by charging a small amount to send email most spammers would find their costs would rise substantially and the worst of the appeals and cons would be no longer viable.

As for how to spend the money, I've already posted one suggestion, perhaps you have some.

You seem to be suggesting that a 1/2 cent charge to send an email would have dire consequences. That seems unsupportable, considering all other forms of communications are associated with much higher charges. But perhaps you can offer something other than an opinion to support that assertion.

Would a small charge to send an email help solve the spammer problem, the consensus is that it will. But again, you may have something other than a personal opinion to suggest otherwise.

[viper]

Spam is hardly an issue. You know that bulk folder? You know that EMPTY button? Problem solved. With the way governments spend money, they deserve know more of it. They can't be trusted with it, like a child that can't control himself.

[Muckraker]

I don't see how implementing this type of charge would hurt spammers. Nobody has been able to stop hackers from distributing copyrighted material and cracking every single application and game in existence. How are we going to stop something like emails without "postage?"

Here is an interesting solution:
FOXNews.com - Yahoo, AOL to Charge E-Mail Senders Postage - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News

Two of the world's biggest e-mail account providers, Yahoo Inc. and America Online, plan to introduce a service that would charge senders a fee to route their e-mail directly to a user's mailbox without first passing through junk mail filters, representatives of both companies said Sunday.

The fees, which would range from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per e-mail, are the latest attempts by the companies to weed out unsolicited ads, commonly called spam, and identity-theft scams.

So you can send as many emails as you want but if you want to be sure they get to AOL and Yahoo users you have to pay a premium.

[grandpa]

I don't see how implementing this type of charge would
hurt spammers.
Nobody has been able to stop hackers from distributing copyrighted
material and cracking every single application and game in existence.

It might punish those spammers a little, but it will also punish everyone else.

Grandpa h.

[Orangutan]

I would welcome the idea apart from the inherent problems it raises.

1. "!/2 cent" would almost immediately raise, because someone, somewhere, would be getting that money, meaning they would have direct incentive to increase it. History shows time and again that promises to not increase new taxes are fake. They increase.

2. In order to send payment online, you'd need some form of ID. To me this stinks of a backdoor into forcing you to give your ID before sending. I LIKE the fact that I can be anon by email - then again the main reason is to avoid personalised spam..

3. As someone pointed out, the US government already sucks up far too much money. Give them any more and they'd just start another war and piddle on their own constitution even more.

Regarding the idea of hackers bypassing it, that would not be a major problem, depending where exactly the gateway was placed. Certainly not on the user's computer but yes, it could work if implemented at a higher level.

The really stupid thing about spam is there are not that many spammers. Quite a lot of small fry but the bulk comes from a relatively small number of people.

I think, without giving it too much thought, that what I'd prefer would be a system whereby you could charge someone who sent you an email.

You wouldn't do it to friends or your workplace, you'd soon get blacklisted if you did it to regular business but users themselves would be the ideal "filter".

You get some spammy email and get the satisfaction of charging the ^$#.

Works for me...



O.

[barts]

Spam is hardly an issue. You know that bulk folder? You know that EMPTY button? Problem solved. With the way governments spend money, they deserve know more of it. They can't be trusted with it, like a child that can't control himself.

If you look at previous links I posted, or even Google "spam" with some search terms like "economics" "impact" or "cost", you'll find that your view is without merit. Spam is very real economic problem.