Spam Blocker Charges For Email
from the pay-to-play dept
Whenever the question of how to stop spam comes up, I hear someone say that adding a "payment" mechanism to spam would immediately reduce the quantity of spam. However, there are always problems with implementing such a system. Now, a new company is launching just such a system that to let people charge others to email them. Of course, it doesn't address most of the problems that are always discussed around such a solution - and seems to do some very questionable things in their implementation. It's really just a badly implemented version of a whitelist, that includes transaction fees. Since spammers don't respond to whitelist "confirmation" requests, why not just use whitelists instead? The way this system is set up, even your friends will need to pay each time they send you email - which isn't likely to create many happy friends. Furthermore, to make matters worse, the only way to pay someone to email them is to sign up for the service yourself. For that reason alone, I imagine that most people would never bother to send email to anyone using such a system. No matter what, any sort of micropayment system misses the point of email altogether - which is that it's a costless system on purpose. Adding fees would do more to damage email than the benefit found from slowing down spammers.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
