R.A. Hettinga writes:
mail, followed by email from strangers (which is where all the spam is).
A whitelist for my friends, all others pay...
oh, forget it.
Anybody can pay to send email right now. You just go to paypal, type in the person's email, enter the amount of money you think is necessary to persuade them to read the email, and put the text of your message in the comment box. My email is paypal.com@russnelson.com; feel free to send me as much email as you want, ca-ching! But anyway, that's not what I propose. I suggest that email from strangers needs to come with an introducer of some sort to convince you to read it. There's a dozen different kind of introducers which could be used, some of them using cryptography, only one or two of which involve payment. The days when all email was treated equally by an email client are long past, or at least, should be if you're running a decent email client. Maybe the level of spam complaints is caused by the low quality of email clients? -- --My blog is at angry-economist.russnelson.com | Violence never solves Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | problems, it just changes 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 212-202-2318 voice | them into more subtle Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | FWD# 404529 via VOIP | problems.