Yah, it was published, too!  Yowza!! I get a few things out into the public now and then!

Definitions

No, I’m not gonna define “spam” for you.  We don’t need no legalistic legalisms here.  YOU know what spam is.  If you’ve had an e-mail account for more than 10 minutes, you’ve probably already deleted 30 of ‘em.

Numerous options are being explored for the elimination of “Spam”.  I believe there’s an option that just doesn’t get the attention it deserves.  To be “formal” about it (and coz I’m cut-n-pasting from my letter), the option I’m talking about is the “Economic” method.

I.e., everybody gets charged a penny for every e-mail they send.  Not for e-mail they receive – only what they send.

The Economic Spam Control Method

The economic method for fighting spam is given short shrift. One of the reasons the "penny per e-mail" method is too often dismissed is that there’s not much discussion of exactly where that penny goes. The sender pays a penny, but who gets it? The right answer to that question can mitigate some of the concerns: The penny should go to the owner of the ISP that delivers the e-mail to the final recipient, so that, in effect, an ISP charges others to deliver e-mail to its customers.

That was in my letter.  But you know, I think the real reason is the general Anti-Capitalistic attitude that permeates the entire world these days.  Like, why can’t I sell my own blood?  It’s mine ain’t it?  People have gotten this “Money can’t buy happiness”, and “The good things in life are free”, and garbage like that, all stuck in their brains.  Yah, it oughta be free until you’re the one who has to provide the “good things”, then alla sudden it’s “WHERE’S MY MONEY, DUDE???”

Some objections are that no ISP is set up to charge this way. But 10 years ago, no ISP in the world was set up to validate relayed e-mail or to filter spam.  Now both practices are common. This required changes to mail-server software, and adding a "sender pays" system would not be much different.

(As a matter of fact, this “open-relay” system was touted as one of the strengths of the Internet – if one server goes down, another one automatically takes over the routing!  Well, that was great when it was the ARPAnet, and only used by the military and universities – now, as a commercial enterprise, that’s proven to be a liability.)

Infrastructure Changes and Free Services

It’s been argued that it would require an entirely new infrastructure for the industry. But we already have most of the pieces of such an infrastructure, including Internet credit card payments, Internet bill payments, PayPal, and similar services.  Even Yahoo! will let you send money via e-mail with their "Yahoo! PayDirecot from HSBC."

Some people worry that "sender pays" would kill free services such as Yahoo! and Hotmail.

Balderdash!! (Oh, I love that word!  I’ve been waiting years for an excuse to use it!)

This is simply one additional cost added to their existing costs. Yahoo!, Hotmail, et al already pay for computers, hard disks, bandwidth, and personnel. It’s all funded from advertising. However, at the same time, it is an additional stream of income. Yahoo! et al would receive a penny for each e-mail they deliver to their customers. They’d probably throw away all their spam filtering software the day such a system is put into place!  “AH HAH!!  MORE MONEY!!  YAH BABY!!”

What about their out-going e-mail, that the Yahoo! customer would have to pay?  Feh!  Once again, it can come out of their advertising budget.  They’d easily set up their systems such that no-pay customers get X number of e-mails sent for free every month, and after that, they have to purchase a “premium” account.

Probably overall the expense of sending e-mails would be more-or-less balanced by the income of receiving e-mails.

Further, the penny doesn’t have to be paid immediately upon receiving e-mail. The larger ISPs could easily set up accounts where payments could be made monthly based on the actual auditable number of e-mails. This easily solves the issues of "fractional penny" payments and addresses concerns about massive additional e-mail traffic for processing payments.

But I think "fractional penny" is absurd!  Make it a full penny per e-mail!

Touching on this “additional e-mail traffic” for a second – WHAT additional traffic?  Spam currently takes up EIGHTY FIVE PERCENT of all e-mail traffic in the world!  You don’t think a system that cuts that down to maybe 5 or 10 or even 50% would be worth a little overhead??

Mailing Lists are Anachronisms (gesundheit!)

Some have complained about expenses for mailing lists.  Gee, I didn't know that old anachronism still existed!  Isn't that all done on the Web now?

Well, nevermind.  Would such a system make mailing lists economically unfeasible?  Of course not!  Any mailing list can simply require that each recipient send an e-mail back to the main server for each e-mail they receive. The list can send out 10,000 e-mails to 10,000 customers at a cost of $100. Each of 10,000 recipients sends an acknowledgement e-mail back, so that the list then receives 10,000 pennies.

Any recipient who fails to perform this duty, which they’d have to agree to as a condition of joining, is dropped from the list. It wouldn’t be long before mail client software would have a "penny payback" system in place, where the user can control exactly which recipient receives acknowledgements automatically.

After I wrote this in my letter, it occurred to me that the list owner probably isn't the ISP, and probably doesn't have their own server in place for e-mails, and so the list owner wouldn’t really get the payments.  But I still think it’s a workable solution.

Instead of a "penny payback", the list owner can just charge their members for the service of being a member of the mailing list.  Come on, people!  If your mailing list is all that valuable, why shouldn’t people pay for the privilege?  If you don’t want to pay for a membership, maybe you need to cut back on the mailing lists you’re a member of.  That’s back to this Anti-Capitalistic attitude I mentioned earlier.  Everybody thinks everything is supposed to be free.

Sorry, folks, but the Real World don’t operate like that.  You might not pay for the "free lunch," but somebody has to.

And just how much money are we talking about, anyway?  What do you get, 10 emails every day from a mailing list?  You can’t afford $36.50 a year for membership?  Come on, I’ve heard of cheap, but this is ridiculous!

Penny Email and the Law

One final difficulty I’d like to address is that the system would have to be legally mandated, but can’t be mandated worldwide.

(This little detail doesn’t seem to bother drug warriors, who are constantly badgering other nations to step up their drug enforcement efforts to match our misguided efforts.)

But this does not need to be legally mandated.  Sure, we could speed things along by passing a bunch of laws and crap.  But the Internet community already has numerous standards bodies that create rules and protocols for all sorts of interactions, such as the correct way for two mail servers to interact in sending each other e-mail. The millions of mail servers out there are perfectly free to follow those rules or not.

The ones who break the rules too severely end up being avoided in one manner or another.

E.g., the old rules were that all a sender needed to say was “HELO” (that’s right, only one “L”).  The rules now stipulate that you have to say who you are in that statement.  An e-mail server at Hotmail for example would have say, “HELO hotmail.com”.  If it doesn’t, the recipient server complains and disconnects.

The "black hole" lists for open relays, for another example, already have a large number of subscriber ISPs refusing e-mail from anyone who fails to follow the rules concerning open relays.  Thus a large fraction of the e-mail servers in the world can not send e-mail to another large fraction of the servers that subscribe to these lists.  No legislation was required.

Market forces would bring most of the Internet community on board eventually. In the meantime, the customers of ISPs that use the method can have an address book of those for whom they’ll "spot" the penny. Senders not on that list can go into the "no penny" folder for later review. This is better than the black hole system, where senders unfortunate enough to share an IP address with a known spammer cannot send e-mail to half the Internet! Instead of e-mail falling into a “black hole,” the sender would receive a polite note requesting $0.01 to deliver the e-mail.

Conclusion

All in all, I think the method is worth additional investigation. I think somebody with some business savvy and some venture capital should start this right now.  There is a www.pennyemail.com, but as of this writing, they haven’t done anything useful with that site since August ’06.

The only people who really can’t afford a penny per e-mail are the ones who send out millions per day.  You know who I mean – spammers.