notes-computer-emailShouldBeVeryCheapButNotFree

The concept of charging money (or at least a valuable 'proof of work' token) for email is not novel but perhaps my justification is.

Whether or not we would like email to be free, the market sets a non-zero lower price for email. Why? Because there are gullible people. There are people whom, if you send them a properly phrased email, will send you a certain amount of money. Send out such an email to a large number of people, and you are likely to find that a certain percentage of them are gullible enough to reply with money. This sets a lower bound on the price of email.

Any attempt to charge less than this amount for sending an email will create a business opportunity for spammers.

Some try to fight this by trying to stop spam, which is good, because it essentially decreases the profit margin for spam, causing less spam. Others try to fight this by blacklisting spammers, and not just them, but anyone who does business with them. This is bad, because the cost of being blacklisted is high, so people will go to a lot of trouble to avoid it. This is the dynamic that leads to war, as we saw with the Spamhaus vs. Cyberbunker war. War is bad. It would be better if the cost of sending spam were not too high (backlisting), but rather very cheap, yet still substantially more than the profits to be made from it. This would avoid wars.

So, do not make spam easy, but do not declare war on spam either; make spam expensive.