Paying for E-Mail May Be Anti-Spam Tactic

If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit card offers, sweepstakes entries and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send.


What's Next?

[Jason425]

paying for email would suck..

Actually, paying for email through a cryptographic challenge seems like a nice solution. It's essentially free, yet prevents large amounts of emails being sent. Also, a large mailing list might want you to cover the cost of sending large amounts of emails by asking members to "pay" for the emails sent in advance.

This could also be integrated with some of the distributed computing projects already going on, donating "work units" as a payment unit.