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Comment by _wdh | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that there are any opportunities for micropayments. It seems like a solution looking for a problem.

Spam elimination. It's true that mail clients and servers are pretty good at removing spam from our mailboxes these days, but there's still all the busywork that they're doing to send and receive stuff that ultimately never gets seen. A micropayment messaging service could greatly reduce the amount of spam that is actually sent, while allowing through messages that the sender is willing to pay servers to process.

Doing this via a global blockchain might not be viable, of course.

http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt :)

    (✓) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
    (✓) Huge existing software investment in SMTP

Also

   (✓) Sending email should be free

You can still send it for free, but if you want me to read it you'll have to pay! ;)

Actually, if the amount is a flat or mostly-flat rate then most e-mail exchanges would be effectively free (send message, get response, net cost = 0). I'm not sure how it would work with mailing lists/groups though...

Times change. New forms of currency are common now. SMTP is extensible. DomainKeys hapened.

But why would I pay money to send a non-email when people have been trained for years to check their actual email? I'd be paying more for something worth less to me.

The thing that bothers me is that US mail already costs 50 cents and I still get a ton of spam. 90%? So I'm wondering how viable it really is.

A lot of business mailings (at least that's the kind of stuff I consider "spam") get much cheaper rates than run of the mill residential letters, thanks to good ol' regulatory complexity. Ex: http://stateimpact.npr.org/new-hampshire/2011/09/27/how-junk...

Because it's physical, I think you give it more weight (so to speak). I doubt you average more than five or ten pieces of physical junk mail per day, but it's not uncommon to receive hundreds of spam messages a day, or more, most of which is blocked at the server level, and most of the rest of which is blocked by your client filters. I've had my email address for about 15 years, and there are thousands of attempts per day to send to it that my email server blocks, and then when gmail picks up my mail it cuts out promotional and social stuff, as well as whatever it think is spam, and I end up seeing 5-10 messages a day total (including mail I want to see; email is not a major channel for me outside of work any more...).

Further, that physical spam is really, really well targeted compared to email spam. You may not care about most of it, but at least it has something to do with your real life (mostly coupons and advertisements for local businesses, if yours is like mine).

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