For some reason, I heard several times this morning on my local radio station (The Cage on MMM Melbourne) that Hotmail and Yahoo are going to start charging 1c per email sent. Immediately I thought “That can’t work. This is one of those old hoaxes/rumours that they’ve taken as read.” But then I thought “They are a News service, surely they would’ve got this from some official source.”
But subsequently, there is no such news anywhere that I’ve found on the Net about it, so I guess it was all a mistake on their part.
Sure, it’s from an official source…but all that’s really happening is MS and other parties are all discussing ways to deal with email…mass charging would be at one extreme, but it’s the one that catches the eye of a lazy news editor.
Note that this a very preliminary idea being kicked around by a few web giants. It would be set up so that everybody, regardless of ISP, email host, etc., would have to be in on it. This has nothing to do with Hotmail other than the coincidence that it is owned by Microsoft.
Each email sent would be accompanied by “postage”. If you like getting email from that person, you forgive the postage. I.e., your mom doesn’t pay a cent to send you email. If you don’t want the email, then the postage is collected. Spammers would pay. (You don’t get the payment, the ISP/email host would.)
Note:
Everybody, everywhere would have to agree to this system. If the ISPs of the spammers don’t agree and they still send can send email, it fails.
Everybody, everywhere hates Microsoft. Time for Plan 2. Wake me when we get to Plan 9.
