Would paying to send an e-mail reduce the noise?
I was just glancing through my feeds and see an interesting post by Robert Scoble having to do with noise reduction. By that he means the increasing “noise” by the new social services like Twitter, FriendFeed and the like. Good stuff in his post and worth the read… plus it got me thinking. And I mean thinking radically. The biggest “noise-box” in my environment isn’t the hottest, new social networking-Web 2.0-AJAXy-AIR tool. It’s my inbox. And I suspect it is for most of you too. So here’s the radical thought (that will never see the light of day, which is probably a good thing):What if you were charged for sending an e-mail to someone? As in: micropayments to the recipient, who sets a rate to receive your note? Just like a sliding-CPM model in the web advertising world, as a recipient, you would place a value on your time or on the “impression” of that note.Got plenty of time to have e-mail conversations? Set your CPE or Cost-Per-Email at a lowly $0.01. Backed up with e-mails or need to spend time on a project that commands more of your attention? Raise your CPE to $2.00 a pop. Off for the weekend to spend time with the family? Hey, it’s going to cost you $10 to get my attention on your note during my off-time.Yup, it’s a crazy idea and certainly wouldn’t work as stated in a corporate environment. But something in Robert’s post resonated in me because the new noise-makers are “unlimited and free”. I think way, way back when folks had to pay for each phone call they made at their house. Let me tell you… there was a lot less noise back then. Then the trend became “unlimited calling”, which I fully take advantage of. It also means “unlimited noise” when you think about it. OK… no more thinking for me today. 
At last, I’d have a good reason for why I send EVERYTHING via instant messenger.
I proposed the same idea in a letter printed in the August 1998 issue of PC Magazine. I still think it is a good idea. Even a price of one cent would make almost all spam uneconomical.
Such a proposal could be combined with a whitelist so that people who send out regular newsletters could still do so without paying $10 each time they sent to their 1000 willing recipients.
If such a plan existed there could be a rapid switch to individuals blocking all email that doesn’t pay to play.
My prediction is that this will happen all of a sudden, both for the positive feedback reason described above and because of the potential for malware that collects email addresses and makes conventional email virtually useless.
Come the Revolution, you will hang for making us pay for email!
Besides, how frikkin often do you hear from ME?
Enough that I could quit my day job…. again.
Now you have me thinking of charging for blog comments too, Mike. 
I think Ricky B is pretty close to an idea that would work. The money could even go to charity or to building more internet infrastructure. Even a legitimate power user would only spend a dollar or 2 a day, but the spammers would be gone.
I can’t see how it could possibly work. How is this going to prevent malware/spyware/viruses from sending email from a zombie machine? Who’s going to police it? Are you going to force Joe Average (with the Zombie machine) to pay for his spammers emails? Please tell me how?
One would need an account to charge the fees. It should not be hard to figure out some system to prevent people from using stolen credit cards. The system for digital certificates could be a guide.
With our current system we face the prospect of a complete collapse of email.
I’m not sure that free email will necessarily collapse. Besides, an imposed pricing model would likely violate freedom of expression, and the one that’s being kicked around on threads like these (a flat per-email charge) is regressive in that it allows the rich to send more email than the poor, for X percentage of their incomes.
Many phone companies have unlimited calling plans, and that world hasn’t ended. I don’t have to pay each time I walk out on the street and say something aloud. In those cases, we have noise by-laws and harassment suits that target only those who take things to a “problem” level.
While we have already subjected the means of communication (ISP access) to the free market, to impose an artificial market on expression itself would be unconstitutional, unfair and unpopular.
Hey, jk, how about a system where if we read a blog’s entries, WE GET PAID?
I have PayPal now, Fiend!
Pay up!
Mwahahahaha.
Hi Kevin,
I do not think it would be a good development to introduce a payment fee for sending an e-mail to someone. Owning a computer is already a financial investment. Companies next don’t tell you that a lot is share- and crapware, which already leaves you with a reduced usefullness of your purchase. Having an Internet connection is also a financial hurdle. With the introduction of paying e-mail you are potentially creating a barrier in free communication and sharing, that which was one of the aims of having Internet in the first place. I could imagine a worldwide collaps of the Internet, which would lead us back to the start of the 70’s technology. I think a lot of people would start leaving their computers in the attic and go discover nature. Bye bye computer market and a collapse of an economy.
It’s funny to me that people complain so much about things like spam email, when I never hear anyone complaining about the garbage they have to pull out of their real mailbox, daily.
How many credit card apps do you get a week? For me, it’s more than I’d care to count. With all the junk I get in my mailbox, I have to take time out of my day to actually physically destroy the mail.
With email, you setup a filter or check a box, and the mail is gone. Or, for that matter, just ignore it. I’d much rather check a few boxes for deletion than destroy my real junk mail.
… and I’d also point out that the fact that mail that comes to your mailbox is paid for doesn’t seem to have much of an affect on the level of crap that’s sent. I know it’s hard to believe, but people do actually pay real money to send that stuff to your door.
Nate: Your point is valid for personal e-mail where spam is limited to a few messasges. It’s significantly different when running a business with an e-mail address posted online and several hundred spam messages are received daily. Spam blockers aren’t reliable, and it becomes a chore to find the few meaningful messages.
So, everyone needs to, literally, pay the price?
Sorry. I say, live with it. You don’t make everyone else pay for your problems.
There is another way to do this. Similar, parallel proposals have been made where the ¨cost¨ is a cryptographic problem that must be solved. This results in a slight amount of time on the sending computer´s side before it can send the email. For any normal user of email, this would almost never be noticed, but for someone that wants to bulk send a ton of e-mail, they would be reduced from something like 1000 messages per second to one every few seconds or so, increasing their cost, but having littl to no impact on anyone else.
Benjamin Ries: If 90% of the phone calls you got were spam, people would be looking for solutions there too. We haven’t seen such a huge problem with phone calls because it costs money to pay callers, but now that there are bulk calling services the problem may indeed get out of hand.
Unwanted postal mail is not a big problem because it costs quite a bit to send the material, and the marketers do a decent job at choosing things that interest people. If email cost a hundredth of what postal mail costs there would be very little spam.
A good way to introduce such a system is to have ISPs offer an email program that imposes a penny charge and only accepts mail from others who collect the charge. If there is a sudden worsening of the spam problem I could imagine people shifting to the penny plan, and a network effect of others shifting to be able to get through to others on the penny plans.
Spam filters, unfortunately, stop some emails you want. At 1 penny it would certainly not be a barrier to anyone sending personal emails or doing legit business. The only reason the spammers stay in business is because there is no cost. In my business (real estate) If I send out 100 mailers and get a response from 5 people that is a incredible rate of return. However a spammer only needs 1 response out of millions of emails to make it work. So just as the cost of postage stamps keeps me from sending 5 letters a day to everyone in my town, 1 penny per email will keep the spammers from sending me 300+ emails a day about making certain parts of my anatomy the size of a telephone pole.
I don’t know where all of you were,this idea was already suggested many years ago,if i am not mistaken (have a bad memory), by Microsoft or Bill Gates. But apparently no one cared.
People. You’re completely missing the point.
A spammer doesn’t care if you’re paying for his email!
It will make NO difference except to line the pockets of those charging for the email to be sent. It can not work.