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Comment by geek_at | Hacker News Reader

reminds me of Bill Gates in the 90s when asked about email spam. He said it would make sense to make an email cost like 1 cent so the spammers can't spam as much but this didn't sit right with the mindset of the people at the time.

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Also, while real people probably would not be willing to pay to E-mail, spammers who are making money would pay and consider it a cost of doing business. So the fee is having the opposite of its intended effect.

I don't think the current firehose model of spam would be sustainable anymore, though. Those spammers send millions of mails a day. Even with a 1 cent cost, they'd have to be much more selective about their address lists, given the low success rate. It may not solve the problem but I'm almost sure it would help a little. It also may be an additional qualitative barrier for crime-linked spam such as phishing mails, because they'd have to try and find a non-traceable was of payment, which is not trivial and always carries a slight risk of being identified anyway.

Hashcash was a proof-of-work system that would have put a computational tax on email. I don't know what kept it from getting more traction other than simple chicken-and-egg network effects, but it's a good idea, and worth resurrecting.

http://www.hashcash.org

Email2000 is the only answer: https://cr.yp.to/im2000.html

TLDR: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility. The message isn't copied to the receiver. All the receiver needs is a brief notification that a message is available.

Sounds like a horrible system where you retain many of the problems of email (you still need to deliver notifications) and new surveillance and persistence and mutability problems layered on top..

We need something else, we need an "extreme" (~$1) fine that anyone can claim from any sender who bothered them, no questions asked. Spammers will stop instantly overnight. This would work for phone spam as well.

I read about an idea for an incentive/check system like that before. Something like: make the cost 10c instead of 1c, but implement a system where recipients can mark mails as confirmed "wanted" mail, upon which the sender would be reimbursed 9c. Increasing the cost for unsolicited mails while keeping the cost low for well-behaved newsletters.

community idea:

"my2cents"

0.02 to post or send a message

it's also something that was in my mind when i wrote about those two options. I still keep this idea in the back of my head since those days (i'm old enough to remember when gates had this atrocious, yet interesting idea).

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