Are you ready to pay for e-mail?

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Let's not get emotional

A short summary of all ever discussed ways to fight spam that I am aware of:
* Legislations -- never can be enforced hence not worse mentioning
* Filtering -- the most used option today. I only allow in my inbox the messages sent from people in my address book or in my safe list. I also have one email addresses to communicate with "reliable" parties and another -- for the rest of the world. I still have to spent time periodically combing through my junk mailbox. The period gets shorter with time because it is easier to deal with a few tens of those messages rather than a few hundreds. There is also a risk to open accidentally an infected message.
* Making changes in internet protocols or replacing them altogether with something new, boldly built with security and anti-spam facilities in mind. Nice idea even though costly. Will never work. Indeed, we see now devastating viruses that are created mainly "for fun." Any security system will be hacked if the hackers are paid millions to hack it...
* Pay-for-email systems. If sending a message costs, say, $0.00001, it will stop the spammers who sent messages by the millions and won't put too much pressure on the "normal" people like you and I. But this also cannot work. There is no thinkable way to make people pay for sending messages. It is possible to request payments for receiving other people's email unless they are in your safe list... but this is just a weird option of filtering, see above. Making everybody pay you for reading their messages could actually work... but not quite, because transaction fees will be significantly larger than the payments and you will end up paying the third party rather than collect.

Does it mean there is no solution? Yes.. and no. None of the above can solve the problem once and for ever. All of the above in some combination may help make life easier. A role of per message charges or the like, however, will hardly be significant. What a shame, considering that chargeable email would have provided the ultimate solution to the spam problem -- had it been implementable!

Posted by: vef   Posted on: 02/05/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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