Pay-per-email plan to beat spam and help charity

Yahoo! wants to reinvent the postage stamp to cut spam. Researchers are testing a scheme where users pay a cent to charity for each email they send – so clearing their inbox and conscience simultaneously.

You may see less spam these days, but it is more abundant than ever, making up more than 90 per cent of all email sent globally. Most is intercepted by anti-spam programs that filter mail by its origin or content.

Yahoo! Research's CentMail resurrects an old idea: that levying a charge on every email sent would instantly make spamming uneconomic. But because the cent paid for an accredited "stamp" to appear on each email goes to charity, CentMail's inventors think it will be more successful than previous approaches to make email cost. They think the cost to users is offset by the good feeling of giving to charity.

more: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17577-payperemail-plan-to-beat-spam-and-help-charity.html

Does anyone actually buy this, reduce spam, LOL?

The charity thing is just to get people to accept paying for each email, it will only last so long and the corporations will see $$$ in their eyes.

The sell rate is usually tiny like 1/1000th of 1%. Any cost would make spam prohibitive but there is no cost so it works.

Not saying this concept will work but maybe a govt mandated 1 cent per email fee would. An ISP would simply delete any email that did not have a 1 cent digital stamp and notify the sender.

SPAM would stop overnight. It would be cost prohibitive.

That is not done for free and putting their message in front of people is not going be stopped by the cost. It may reduce it but never stop it.

Ok I concede you can't stop it but you could cut it by 99.999999%. Good enough for me.

All straight to recycling with out reading. I check to make sure my name is not on anything and then in the recycle bin it goes.

Remember when text messages ere free? And now it costs 5 cents each? and the price WILL go up.
Yahoo is trying to be greedy about sending e-mail.
Is yahoo talking about incoming or outgoing or both?

They are, this week, going to lose my business just for thinkig about the idea.
there are plenty of free e-mail programs.

Grrrrrrrrr...

if their e-mail is deleted when unopened. Why don't we get the money.

Since most people send & receive email the net cost becomes close to zero.

128 email sent = $1.28 in charges, $1.49 emails received = $1.49 credit = - $0.19 deducted from internet cost.

For those (spammer) who send tens of millions of emails per month and receive a tiny fraction it would be prohibitive.