A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

[Bill Stewart]

At 12:09 PM 05/13/2003 -0700, Joseph Ashwood wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Derek Atkins" <derek at ihtfp.com>
>Subject:  Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

 > [Micropayment, sender pays recipient, refund for non-spam]

>So you're expecting that everyone will be honest about cashing
>micropayments? That seems rather silly, if such a mechanism were to become
>required on the internet I'd simply retire today, sign my email accounts
>(all except 1) up on every spam list, every mailing list, everything that
>would get me thousands of tokens a day, have an automated script cash all
>the tokens for me, and I'm generally considered fairly scrupulous.

I can see the advertising campaign for this now:
 > You, yes YOU!! Can M4K3 M0N3Y FA$T!  Just By READING EMAIL!!!
 > FIND OUT HOW BY SENDING US $9.95 or 10.2Euros or 1 Gram of e-Gold!

It's frustrating, because just about any set of who-pays-whom-for-email
fails badly other than sender-pays-recipient-somehow.