OT: Charge / tax per e-mail?

[Sabin]

If an actual bill was to release, the price should be somewhat more reasonable, if it can prevent spam from continuing it's rather irritating progression.

I just used a computer calculator to see what the costs were if such a bill was passed to charge $0.01 for 1 email that is sent by one person for 365 days:

$0.01 x 365(once per day): $3.65
$3.65 x 100,000(emails, bulk.): $365,000.

That is quite a hefty charge if a person sent email in bulk, let's say they tried to send 1,000 emails for 365 days, at the same price:

$0.01 x 1,000: $10
$10 x 365(10 times per day): $3,650
$3,650 x 100,000(emails per day): $3.65e+008

Mind you, my calculation skills are rather horrible, so these may be inaccurate.

However, if they are accurate, then a 1-cent charge per email can reduce the amount of emails made by those who create spam, due to the enormous bill they would acquire.

However, how would this affect real companies? I believe if they send a large amount of e-mail, perhaps they can acquire licenses from the government to reduce/eliminate the costs.
(Though that would make them a major target for spam creators.)

However, the money the government makes can be placed into policing spammer activities, which can lead to a very profitable cycle.(Or disasterous, if the amount of spam creation gets too low, which may prompt the abandoning of the enforcement agencies, therefore leading to more spam being created.)

[narf poit chez BOOM]

how about 0.00001^2 per email? would cut down spammers, but not really affect anybody else.

[Cipher7071]

When I came in today from round 1 of scooping snow from my driveway, I put on some soup and decided to watch a little TV with lunch. 'The McLaughlin Group' (political discussion) was on PBS. Somewhere toward the end of it, up came a picture of our old buddy Bill Gates advocating what...?

You guessed it: the very topic of this thread. It seems he is now advocating a 1 cent per e-mail fee as a solution to spam. The story said that about 58% of e-mail is spam, and Bill Gates seems to think that the problem will be solved in 2 years. He must see a buck in it for Microsoft somewhere.

Maybe that's what spawned the return of that urban legend. Just when I thought this thread was headed for the boneyard...

[ February 22, 2004, 17:23: Message edited by: Cipher7071 ]

[Parasite]

I read a Sci-Fi book that seemed to have a good idea. Everyone could set the price for recieving Email. You would pay that price to send email to that address. If someone sent a message to your $100 box, you would tend to pay attention. If they sent it too your 5 cent or 1 cent less so. You could then do a reply to cancel the fee. This still has some problems like address spoffing, money landering, ect, but it does seem to be a possible start.

Why let the goverment in, can't we be greedy too.

I don't remember the book name, but it was about a Beserker type device attacking earth every 5 years. Not a "Beserker" Beserker , but a planetoid machine like the Saber...n kind.