Proposed e-mail plan: Sender pays per message. Good idea?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Just spotted this article in Slate today:

Is it Crazy To Charge People To Send You Email?
Maybe. But it sure would cut down on clutter. By Esther Dyson, Sunday, Feb. 24, 2013

Author (who disclaims that she is invested in this idea) suggests e-mail management services, whereby an e-mail recipient can specify how much he wants to be paid for each e-mail he receives, to be paid per-message by e-mail senders. Recipients can create white-lists of course and would be able to retroactively reverse charges. Recipients could create multiple classes of sender lists, who would be charged different amounts.

The argument is that this would push the burden of prioritizing e-mails back onto the senders, and thus vastly reduce the amount of unwanted e-mail that gets sent.

I know this idea has been kicked around for years in one form or another. Author suggests that the time has come for this.

Good idea?

2

I used to think something like this would be the long-term solution to spam. Having spent several years researching and fighting spam, I’ve seen enough evidence to be quite sure it’s not.

It may or may not work as a means of prioritizing and de-cluttering messages, I don’t really know.

3

Depends on the break-even cost for spam. If it’s a Nigerian scammer and he stands to make $50,000 off of somebody by cleaning out their savings, even if he has to pay a nickel an email he can still send a bunch of spam. Even with white lists, this would just serve to drive up the cost of legitimate email.

4

That idea is about the only thing I remember from a Bill Gates book I read in the 90s.

I have always liked the idea, but I think it would be incredibly difficult to add that to the existing email system.

5

Charging senders for stamps hasn’t reduced the amount of junk mail I receive.

6

Does anyone with gmail actually have a problem with spam anymore? I haven’t received an unwanted email in years.

7

Ah, but if you could specify what it would cost each direct-mailer to send to you, I bet you could make quite a dent!

I wish I’d been able to bill Mitt Romney an appropriate fee for all the crap he sent me last year.

8

Isn’t most spam sent from hijacked accounts anyway? The spammers aren’t going to be the ones getting the bill.

Sounds to me like this is a solution in search of a problem. I have a foolproof way of getting rid of spam that’s worked for me for 15 years - I call it “the delete button”.

9

Adding a few seconds between emails would cut down almost all spam.

10

“hijacked accounts” is oversimplifying things, but yes, this is one of the problems.

The bigger problem is that this kind of solution assumes a comfortable margin between the amount spammers (and other nuisances) are willing to pay, and the amount a non-spammer would be willing to pay. For the most obvious and stupid types of spam, that may well be the case - but that kind of spam is easy to detect and stop anyway, it’s basically a solved problem. On the other hand there are large and growing areas of spam where the spammers are not merely willing to spend more than other spammers, and reduce the margin of comfort; but they would in fact be willing to spend more than legitimate users. Not only is the margin gone, it’s turned negative.

11

A few seconds per sender? Per server? Per recipient? Per what?

12

But at least the recipient would get the money. Everybody in the world is cordially invited to send me a message if I get paid a dime for deleting it.

13

Per sender, you can’t send out millions of emails a day if you have to wait five seconds per email.

14

Where “sender” equals “email address”? Spammers just use millions of different email addresses.

Also, how does one mail server know that john@example.com just sent an email using a different mail server?

And finally, what about services that have a legitimate need to send many emails? This forum, for example. It may well send more than 17k emails per day.

15

What are the evidence/arguments that this won’t work?

Note that the receiver of the e-mail gets to specify how much the sender must pay to send him an e-mail, and also that the receiver of the e-mail is the one who actually gets this money. (For persons who don’t want to commercialize themselves this way, the author also suggests that the money might be sent to a designated charity.) She is talking of typical charges on the order of $1.00 per e-mail, not a nickel or a dime. That should be enough to stop most spammers and scammers from sending to anyone who uses this service.

With white-lists, the receiver can add a sender retroactively. That is, after you receive a message, you can decide if the sender was welcome to send it, and cancel the charge for the mail he already sent.

There is already a cost for legitimate e-mail, in terms of the time spent by the receiver to open it and decide what to do with it. You wouldn’t consider this in a mail from a friend, but in a business e-mail, it is part of the cost of doing business. And it is an external cost, meaning that the person who bears the cost (the receiver) isn’t the one who got to decide if he consents to that. Billing the sender, with the receiver being the beneficiary of that, shifts the cost to the sender and compensates the receiver (whether personal or business e-mail). The receiver then gets to decide if he will accept the cost (as, for example, a customer service department might do).

So, by these arguments, it just shifts the costs of e-mail to where the costs ought to be.

I get tons and tons and tons of spam via gmail. Now, gmail is quite good at filtering it and sending it to my spam folder, where I never look. But even if I did look, the occasional legit mail that gets sent there would be hard to spot among all the spam. If every one of those had to pay $1.00, there were be a massive reduction of that. OTOH, like kellner noted, I’d be delighted to get that spam if I got $1.00 for each. Hell, I think I’d charge $5.00 per spam! I could optimize the price I charge for spam to maximize my income.

The recipient would be expected to put those senders on his white list. For example, I get e-mail alerts and such, from my banks, credit cards, insurance companies, and such. Of course, they would insist that I add their addresses to my white list.

16

There would need to be a mechanism by which the sender could determine if they’re on the whitelist or not prior to sending.

17

Good point. Perhaps there could be a field in the email header where the sender specifies the maximum they are willing to pay to have the email delivered. To deliver to white-list sites only, specify $0. If the maximum they specify is less than the charge set by the receiver, the email is junked.

18

Given a choice between this and the current situation, who would choose it? I don’t think I would, despite the annoyance of spam.

I mention this because there’s no way this could be implemented everywhere instantaneously - and during the transition, people will choose the free option. Also, during the transition, the new system won’t work because you’ll have non-compliant senders trying to email recipients who expect the new protocol.

19

Yes, this exactly. The Internet was created with open protocols, no restrictions on who could send email.

Everyone would need to change at once for it to work. If Yahoo decided to start charging for sending e-mail, people would move to Hotmail/Gmail/whatever. And why would Hotmail and Gmail change if they just got all Yahoo’s users?

Even if you could get all the major players to start charging, there are still hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of other mail servers that don’t and maybe can’t start charging. You’d have to update the server software, put a payment system in place to do microtransactions, all that. Many mail servers run on not-for-profit sites, who is going to pay the expense to send? And what should receiving mail servers do when they receive a non-paid message?

A lot of very smart people have discussed and worked on this problem and it almost seems like we’ve come too far to change now. See the why-it-won’t-work form

20

As someone else said, this looks like a solution in search of a problem. I get very little spam, and I can’t recall the last time the spam filter missed it. Hell, I get more physical junk mail than I do spam email, and that already costs money and is more annoying since I have to actually throw it out.

The real issue with spam isn’t the annoyance. Even when I used to get 15-20 a day, it took all of 5s to highlight and delete them. The problem is the resources that it uses and, thus, the cost to maintain that wasted bandwidth, and the extra storage space and processing, that is ultimately passed on to consumers. But it seems to me that most email services are taking active steps to correct the problem. I they detect high amounts of spam coming from certain IPs or networks, they take that into account in their filters and may even block them from entering their network. The better that can be done, the more expensive it becomes for the spammer to maintain a network that isn’t blacklisted on most or all of the most popular providers.

Worse, this seems to me like it would have a negative impact on my service. Of course I’d whitelist family and friends, but what about a new acquaintance, a friend changes email, I sign up for a new service. I’m not necessarily going to know all the email addresses I want to receive emails from. If I set that value too high, those people may not be willing to pay even believing that it’s quite likely I’ll retroactively give it back. If I set it too low, it will do little to discourage spamming, which would still be cheaper than junk mail or cold calling. In both cases, it puts a burden on me to maintain a list.

When it comes to mail filtering, we also have to consider the costs associated with incorrect classification. If I falsely identify spam as legitimate email, the cost is a second or two on the part of the user to realize it and delete it; it’s a very low cost. On the other hand, if I falsely identify legit email as spam, the cost is high. I could miss a bill, a letter from an old friend; in one case for me, I missed an important email from a girl I was dating and it made for an awkward conversation when she was under the impression I was aware of certain things and I wasn’t. The cost of a false positive is really high. Putting an actual monetary value on it just makes this whole situation worse.

If something like this were done, it would need to be highly intelligent sampling and the idea would be that the sender would be acknowledging that they don’t know me and I could get paid some small amount in exchange for viewing their email, set a threshold for how much I’m willing to be paid for the inconvenience, or straight up opt out. But that could be bad too since them being willing to pay for it may inadvertantly lend some credibility to a phishing attempt or a scam rather than just an ad.

So, no, this seems like a really bad idea to me. Spam isn’t a problem for most users, costs for spammers are increasing, even if it isn’t approaching being prohibitive. We’ll see better results as people are more educated in identifying spam and scams and we can instead make it prohibitively expensive by reducing the hits they get through that understanding, continuing to improve the existing filters, and encouraging people to use services with higher quality filters.