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Comment by bcrl | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this. Spammers have the technical competence to overcome any technical hurdle, so using evidence of technical competence achieves nothing.

If it were possible to charge $0.25/email for delivery, I'd be more than happy . However, I'm sure large tech firms will need to say that is "too hard to implement at scale".

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> using evidence of technical competence achieves nothing

Evidence of technical competence wasn't what I was talking about. I meant that it creates a trail of evidence for police to actually pursue them, particularly in the case of phishing.

To setup DMARC, DKIM and SPF you need to control a domain. Somebody has to own that domain, unless you just hacked a DNS or somebody's already configured email server.

If you hacked it, there's a trail to contact the domain owner to notify them. If you bought it, there's a trail to find the domain owner.

You can obfuscate that with stolen cards and fake registration details, but now there's a central point where identity validation and security can concentrate itself.

A lot of positive side effects happen when the bar is raised from "any email server can send email claiming to be from anybody" to "email can only be sent claiming to be from a domain if the domain approves the sending email server."

At least when the spam concentrates from major senders like Google, etc those major senders have the means to analyze and take steps to prevent it.

> If it were possible to charge $0.25/email for delivery, I'd be more than happy .

I'm baffled by this blend of replies. What exactly do you believe charging for an email would do? I mean, other than fabricating a revenue stream. Do you seriously believe that spam would vanish as soon as anyone charged for it's delivery? Because advertisers already pay for reaching their target audiences, and do so well beyond email.

You actually shouldnt makebit 25 cents to send, just make it so you need to deposit 25 cents for every mail you want to send for a 7 day period and make it trivially easy for me as the recipient to cause ypu to lose that deposit in the 7 days. For example embed a url in the email that i can click to open a webpage that asks me if the email is legit or not with a big red no button and a big green yes button. Money doesnt even have to flow to me. The whole thing could be a non profit that invests the forfitted money in medical research or saving puppies or something else suitably unoffensive.

Stamp costs don't stop snail mail spam, either, unfortunately. I would be concerned if we added something like bitcoin fees to email delivery rather than curtail spam it would just further encourage grifters seeking ROI on their spam deliveries.

What if a single email cost $0.001 cent to send, and it was paid to the recipient? For $10, you could send 10,000 emails. For recipients, every 1,000 emails they get is a dollar in their wallet. You’d need something like a blockchain for this to work because the traditional payment processors still haven’t figured out micropayments.

If snail mail cost $0.001 per recipient people would be getting much, much more junkmail. Likewise, if e-mail cost as much as even bulk snail mail, there'd be much less spam.

Some sort of payment scheme is really the best, most durable option. The problem of mailing-lists and personal correspondence could be solved by an exclusion mechanism where the recipient effectively whitelists senders, explicitly or implicitly (e.g. whitelist a replying-sender automatically if a recipient initiates a conversation).

The problem with a payment scheme is that spammers (who make money by spamming) will happily pay as a cost of doing business (or negotiate discounts/deals), but Joe User might just look at the cost and say, "you know what, maybe I'll send this as SMS instead of E-mail."

So the end result will be more spam and fewer legit E-mails.

I've wondered if it cost $10 to get through my email box the first two times what they would mean.

Hormozi could charge $1,000 to get into his read box.

We could refund people, add them to a whitelist - and return a 405? payment required by default and things change in interesting ways when the amount is variable.

There are platforms based on this idea: pay to reach a public person’s inbox, often with guaranteed responses (“guaranteed” as in “you get a response or you money back”). For example: https://mypublicinbox.com/en/

> What if a single email cost $0.001 cent to send, and it was paid to the recipient? For $10, you could send 10,000 emails. For recipients, every 1,000 emails they get is a dollar in their wallet.

I'm not sure you realize your proposal's only contribution is to worsen spam. You are unwittingly creating an incentive for email providers to lift anti-abuse filters and to maximize the volume of spam delivered to you.

> $0.001 cent

https://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know...

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