Saturday, September 13, 2008

It should cost as much to send an e-mail as it does to send a letter.

Because I have a website, I am able to block many SPAM messages at the server rather than letting them get in my inbox, but even this is a frustration for me because the spammers keep changing e-mail addresses and lately it seems like more than usual are getting through. Many suggest that I need drugs to give me a "hard rod." First off, I'm single and I don't need such a thing. Second, even if I did, I wouldn't be buying something like that from someone who sends out such vulgar e-mail messages. There is no doubt about it, these people are evil and I feel safe in saying that most of the people who send out spam are going to hell. So, we can't convince them to stop sending these messages out of the goodness of there hearts. What we can do is convince them to reduce what they send throught their pocket books.

The problem with e-mail is that it is free. Suppose we created a system in which it cost 42 cents to send an e-mail message. Don't you think spammers would think twice about sending out so much junk that they know most people will not read? The fact is that most people do not send so much e-mail that they couldn't afford to pay this much, but you were to send out a million e-mail messages it might become a burden for you to pay $420,000.

Unlike regular mail, I think the person receiving the e-mail should be the person who receives the money. If we charged for each e-mail message and a person received 300 junk e-mail messages, that would be $126 in his pocket. That would be more than enough to pay for him to delete them from his inbox or make the sender as someone who sends junk e-mail.

I know there are some companies that send out e-mail and are doing so with good intentions. They might find it hard to do this if we charged them, so we might want to set up a system of safe senders. After receiving the first e-mail from an address, a person might mark the sender as safe or unsafe. Safe senders would be instantly notified that they can send e-mail to this person without paying the fee. Unsafe senders would either be completely blocked or they would have to continue paying the fee to send e-mail messages.

This system wouldn't be very hard to impliment and it has the potential to greatly reduce the strain that SPAM places on networks.