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Who is this wrote:

> I give up, spam has finally made email unuseable.
....

This will seem like heresy, but the day will come when we'll all be
happy to pay for email. Imagine an email charge of, say, 1 cent. Would
this be a burden on normal users? I think not, but it would kill the
spammers.

The difficulty, of course, would be in setting up the whole
infrastructure required for recording and billing. But I believe that
the costs imposed by spam have reached the point where setting up such a
system could easily be justified.

Gib

"Nicholas Sherlock" wrote
| Okay.. how would you charge? For sending emails through your ISPs SMTP
| server? Won't work, you can send emails directly to other ISPs incoming
mail
| servers.

Make SMTP auth the norm, that way you have to use your ISPs SMTP server.

"T.N.O" <> wrote in message
news:3f2f6a90$...
> "Nicholas Sherlock" wrote
> | Okay.. how would you charge? For sending emails through your ISPs SMTP
> | server? Won't work, you can send emails directly to other ISPs incoming
> mail
> | servers.
>
> Make SMTP auth the norm, that way you have to use your ISPs SMTP server.
>
>

So.. you'd expect the entire world's worth of ISPs to reach an agreement
with every other ISP so that they can send mail to each other??

Cheers,
Nicholas Sherlock

"Nicholas Sherlock" wrote
| > Make SMTP auth the norm, that way you have to use your ISPs SMTP server.
| >
| >
|
| So.. you'd expect the entire world's worth of ISPs to reach an agreement
| with every other ISP so that they can send mail to each other??
|

I never said that it would be easy...
Got a better suggestion?

I also think that all "non-business" connections should be barred from
running servers(you know what I mean... p2p is fine{ish}).
If you want to play with business type servers, get a business type
connection.

Maybe ISP's should specify using ranges of IP's as to what is non/business
connections.

Nicholas Sherlock wrote:

> "Gib Bogle" <> wrote in message
> news:bgnna4$6vh$...
>
>>Who is this wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I give up, spam has finally made email unuseable.
>>
>>...
>>
>>This will seem like heresy, but the day will come when we'll all be
>>happy to pay for email. Imagine an email charge of, say, 1 cent. Would
>>this be a burden on normal users? I think not, but it would kill the
>>spammers.
>>
>>The difficulty, of course, would be in setting up the whole
>>infrastructure required for recording and billing. But I believe that
>>the costs imposed by spam have reached the point where setting up such a
>>system could easily be justified.
>
>
> Okay.. how would you charge? For sending emails through your ISPs SMTP
> server? Won't work, you can send emails directly to other ISPs incoming mail
> servers.

I'm sure there are serious technical obstacles, and I don't know enough
to predict what they might be. I believe the cost of spam will make
people search for a way to impose a cost on spammers to deter them.

In economic terms, the problem is a version of the well-known "tragedy
of the commons", in which (roughly) a free resource is overused to the
extent that everyone finishes up worse off. Overfishing and overpumping
of groundwater are two more examples.

Gib