Chad Smith wrote:
Rod, I agree with you more often than I do with most people on this list, but I'd have to say I don't on this one. I don't like this idea, if for no other reason, I don't want to pay for email. I'm already paying $50 a month for high-speed Internet, there's no way I'm spending 25 cents an email.
Did you read the article? It's very interesting. In the first place, I just pulled the 25 cents figure out of my, ummm... anterior orifice. The current cost of sending spam is somewhere around $0.0001. The whole point is just to make that more expensive. Would you be willing to spend $0.01 per email? My idea behind the fee-bate was two-fold: make spam a lot more expensive to send out and reimburse recipients and ISPs for the trouble of handling it.
Let's say you spent $0.25 to send a message, but received $0.24 for every email in your inbox. For most legitimate personal and business email the incoming will pretty closely balance out with the outgoing.
Spammers are, by definition, not prone to play nice with the system. Case in point, I don't like spam, I put up a filter for key words like viagra, enhancement, porn, etc. So what do the spammers do, they space out the words, or misspell them - pron, \/iagr@ EN HAN CE MENT. Spammers would get around the system, and the only people actually paying the "Spam-tax" would be the law abiding citizens of the net. This is an altogether bad idea.
They wouldn't be able to get around it. The recipient ISP would simply reject the email if the check didn't "clear the bank".
I don't know of a way to stop SPAM, but charging everyone for email is definately not it.
The authors of the article I quoted have other suggestions, undoubtedly better than mine.
In any case, bitching about html-mail sure isn't going to solve it. -- Rod --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
