Bill Gates suggests stamps for email...

[pyonir]

First he wants callerIDnow he wants stamps.

Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail

 

[StageLeft]

The money version simply will not fly. The processing one is interesting, but has a bunch of issues as well.

I think the best thing is to have a .com.safe email address or something, so that eventually people would only accept emails with a .safe suffix, and you can only get such an email address by passing some sort of authentication, and you'll lose it if you abuse your email address.

 

[FeathersMcGraw]

I've heard of a variant of this proposal where you only have to pay if the other person rejects your email. Which means that email is still essentially free(*), but drives the incremental cost of spamming through the roof.

(*) ignoring, of course, the economic perspective where a debit/billing system would have to be devised/maintained to track this.

 

[Entity]

It won't fly. It's too bad -- I'd like to see email reformed, but I'd like there to be a viable way to use it for business as well. Technology will eventually solve this problem, but it may be a while.

Rob

 

[Argo]

I like the idea with 10 second computation loop. I wouldn't mind waiting 10 seconds if that means no more spam.

 

[SunnyD]

What a dink.

 

[StageLeft]

Originally posted by: FeathersMcGraw
I've heard of a variant of this proposal where you only have to pay if the other person rejects your email. Which means that email is still essentially free(*), but drives the incremental cost of spamming through the roof.

(*) ignoring, of course, the economic perspective where a debit/billing system would have to be devised/maintained to track this.

Not sure how that would be implemented, but it would definitely be a great idea. I guess you'd need some escrow count holding money somewhere, so that you pay first before ever sending emails, so that the money is available afterwards if it's rejected. I like it!

 

[amcdonald]

There's absolutely no way that either scenario would last more than a week before getting thoroughly hacked/cracked.

 

[StageLeft]

Originally posted by: Argo
I like the idea with 10 second computation loop. I wouldn't mind waiting 10 seconds if that means no more spam.

Me neither, but 10 seconds on what? 2 ghz machine? Somebody on a 450 would be waiting a lot longer than 10 seconds, and you can't really have it scale up with more powerful machines because the spammers will just say that their server is a 20 mhz and the math problem would be too easy.

 

[Argo]

Originally posted by: Skoorb

Originally posted by: Argo
I like the idea with 10 second computation loop. I wouldn't mind waiting 10 seconds if that means no more spam.

Me neither, but 10 seconds on what? 2 ghz machine? Somebody on a 450 would be waiting a lot longer than 10 seconds, and you can't really have it scale up with more powerful machines because the spammers will just say that their server is a 20 mhz and the math problem would be too easy.

Doesn't matter. It can be a half a second. Spammers send out millions of emails - it'll add up. Plus the hardware companies would love this - "Get a more expensive machine so that you can send email faster"

 

[TheNinja]

Email is free, that's the beauty of it. Let's just keep it that way. I just delete spam and virus emails, it really isn't that hard.

 

[LokiX]

Originally posted by: Staley8
Email is free, that's the beauty of it. Let's just keep it that way. I just delete spam and virus emails, it really isn't that hard.

:beer:

 

[Chumpman]

Originally posted by: LokiX

Originally posted by: Staley8
Email is free, that's the beauty of it. Let's just keep it that way. I just delete spam and virus emails, it really isn't that hard.

:beer:

 

[Siddhartha]

Spam does not bother enough to justify complicating the email process this much.

 

[Vic]

Originally posted by: Staley8
Email is free, that's the beauty of it. Let's just keep it that way. I just delete spam and virus emails, it really isn't that hard.

:beer::beer: