On Thu, 31 Jul 1997, Jeff Barber wrote:

Network bandwidth used for the purpose of email transport, even with increased spamming factored in, is simply too low to justify charging much for it. It will still be *way* cheaper than surface mail.

Yep; which is why it's a bad idea. We don't need net postage to pay the ISP, we need net postage to pay *me* to read the spam. Making them pay $0.0001 to send a message will have little impact, but making them pay me $1 to read it certainly will (i.e. my filters could block all potential spam unless it includes a dollar of ecash). I have no problem with spammers subsidising my Net access, I just object to having to pay for their crap.

So unless the percentage of people who delete it instantly, sight-unseen, is higher than I suspect or new tools make it easy to filter out all spam, it's going to remain economically advantageous for the spammers to target broadly.

I've seen one spam in the last two weeks. The other 100k or so was blocked by my filters; I'm almost starting to miss it. When you actually sit down and analyse the spam most of it has so many obvious 'spam-tags' that you can easily work out a set of rules to catch them. The only disadvantage is that on a couple of occasions it's caught mail from friends when they sent it through a site which appends advertising rather than from their normal address. Mark