Bill Gates has been talking about
charging for email, on a per-email basis.
While I'm not sure I agree with the specific proposals he makes, free email is something that
has always struck me as a flaw to the design of the internet.
A spammer can send out a million emails to get 10 paying customers.
If that doesn't work, they can send out 10 million or a billion,
since there is no additional cost. When you think about it,
it's surprising there isn't even more spam - and there probably will be, soon enough.
If each email were charged 1 cent, spam would become a money-loser
for the perpetrators. I checked and last month I sent out about 150 emails,
and a buck fifty fee isn't so bad. I already pay Postini
a dollar a month for spam and virus filtering, which I would no longer need.
Speaking of spam, the 1 cent fee could be used to pay for virus and worm
filtering at the internet backbone level. So we could get rid of this problem
as well.
Of course, the kicker in all this is that people would flip out if asked to pay
for something which is now free.
Perhaps there could be a separate "premium email" alongside the free email
that now exists, and users could choose to just have premium email,
which would be spam and virus/worm free, and accept free email only on a whitelisted
basis.
