A way to get rid of spam - e-postage

[smartxtai]

good start, but needs development. i'm in high school and am in involved with lots of organizations, and we communicate through email. with all the people i have to email to, thers no way i will have enough money to pay to email to everyone i need to, especially when my emails aren't spam emails at all.

[Mark Stubblefield]

I think what the article is saying is to only charge for 'spam' related emails. Products, etc... Although then you run into problems with trying to monitor all of that. It's just asking for trouble imo

[Apostle 83]

The legal implications of this are incredible. Not only would this amount to violation of the first amendment, to monitor it would require random PHYSICAL server checks, etc.... illegal searches..

Stupid.

[fatboy731]

I'm not a lawyer, but if the first ammendment would be jeopardized by charging for e-mail, a service, then what would become of regular mail? or telephones? We get plenty of junk mail the old fashioned way, and we get plenty of telemarketers, both services are paid services. How is e-mail different from them? Only that it normally is a flat fee for an ISP, however, it is no different from our older forms of communication, except it's a cheaper and more efficient way to annoy us.

[cyphen]

Not to mention it's the first step toward charging everybody for email - no thanks. I'll deal with the spam. how long would it take after the inception of such a decree until it would cost everybody a penny, and then $.02? Once this door is opened, it will be very difficult, if not impossible to close. Charging is certainly not the answer. The answer lies in smart email clients that can recognize spam and are user configurable. Or, as i said before, just deal with it. After all, how hard is it to hit the "delete" button? Trust me - we don't want to go down this road.

"What? All we want you to do is wear this star of david, give us all your posessions for safekeeping, and take a little stroll to camp."

Harsh and dramatic, but in the same vein.

that's my $.02 on the $.01

[RabidCow]

This is typical for David Coursey...a real MS appoligist. Anything to justify the .NET ****, right? .NET? Yes, just another way to get you to pay-as-you-compute. That way you can have an extra monthly bill for e-mail, to go along with your monthly or yearly payments for the OS, Office software, etc. I am really getting sick of hearing people using common problems, such as spam, internet porn etc to justify taking away user's rights or adding a new charge. Most people are dead-set against child porn, but these losers think we should allow the FBI or someone else to read all our e-mail and check out our harddrives to "protect" us (oh yeah, didn't a member of the FBI sell this information??!!). Seems to me that paying for each e-mail to stop spam just ends up with someone profitting because of spam. In fact, lets go one step further and say that spammers could then profit without doing anything. They could just collect the money (well, someone is going to get it...)...I hope I don't sound bitter<G>...

[RabidCow]

This is typical for David Coursey...a real MS appoligist. Anything to justify the .NET ****, right? .NET? Yes, just another way to get you to pay-as-you-compute. That way you can have an extra monthly bill for e-mail, to go along with your monthly or yearly payments for the OS, Office software, etc. I am really getting sick of hearing people using common problems, such as spam, internet porn etc to justify taking away user's rights or adding a new charge. Most people are dead-set against child porn, but these losers think we should allow the FBI or someone else to read all our e-mail and check out our harddrives to "protect" us (oh yeah, didn't a member of the FBI sell this information??!!). Seems to me that paying for each e-mail to stop spam just ends up with someone profitting because of spam. In fact, lets go one step further and say that spammers could then profit without doing anything. They could just collect the money (well, someone is going to get it...)...I hope I don't sound bitter<G>...