Paying if you spam (February 6, 2006)

Interesting, anonymous sender payment is starting to show up in email. This is the most plausible way to deal with spam I have heard of. The general idea is, you set your spam filter to be very suspicious of senders you have never heard of, possibly going to the extreme of not allowing unknown mail at all. Senders who do not make it through the spam filter can then pay a few pennies to send you email. The idea is that instead of stopping spam through direct force, you make it costly. People can still send you email you do not want, but they have to pay you.

There are plenty of clean ups possible once this basic framework is in place. For example:

• People who use cryptographic signatures can better convince an email filter that they are who they are. In turn, once they have the setup to use signatures, they can also accept encrypted email, which should probably be the norm anyway.
• There could be a universal stamping service developed, that all email services can use to accept payment. The stamps would simply be text inserted into the (encrypted) text of the email. This would enable competition between stamp providers, and interoperability between different email servers that require payment.