Pay-per-email plan to beat spam and help charity
Found on New Scientist on Wednesday, 12 August 2009
Researchers are testing a scheme where users pay a cent to charity for each email they send - so clearing their inbox and conscience simultaneously.
Yahoo! Research's CentMail resurrects an old idea: that levying a charge on every email sent would instantly make spamming uneconomic.
Good luck making MTA/MDA/MUA developers implement your system and persuading mailserver admins to upgrade. Good luck setting up a system so that every user worldwide gets billed, dealing with differences in buying power of the local currencies. Good luck stopping malware authors from exploiting your system to simply bill the owner of the zombie. Good luck stopping people from developing free alternatives to your system (or simply sticking with the current SMTP protocol). Good luck convincing people who only do a "select all and delete" to deal with 100+ spam mails a day (like me).