Garbage

March 24, 2004

I have been so inundated with spam over the last couple of weeks that I am seriously considering shutting down all of my current email addresses and starting from scratch. I think it would not be a bad idea to have people pay for email just like people have to pay for using the phone.

Email would still have to remain very cheap in order to be an effective tool, but if you had to pay to use, it would mean that there would have to be a way to identify those individuals that pay for service. Having to identify paying customers would also mean that the anonymity that allows some to send millions of emails filled with garbage with impunity would be over.

It would be very cool to have a checkbox in your email program that said, “Accept paid email only”.