So… according to CNN, Bill Gates thinks its a good idea

And while I do think that SPAM sucks… I don’t think that charging ‘normal’ people to send an email to their mother, father, friends, mailing lists..etc is the way to combat it. I can see why Gates does…after all.. he’s got more money then he knows what to do with. And its obviously easier for him to say ‘charge people for email’ then it is for his company to write software that’s secure enough to prevent any one of the 81,000 viruses that exist for windows from turning the unsuspecting windoze user’s machine into a zombied spam bot!

Sure.. he can afford to pay for email ‘postage’ but what about those people who think they’re already paying way more than their internet connection is worth, now you want them to start paying more to email their relatives, friends, possible employers..etc? I don’t think the guys in M$ Research who have been working on this for 3 years really thought this one through…

Besides… who get’s the ‘postage’ the ISP that is already over-charging for the service they provide? The recipient’s ISP? The developer of your email program of choice? The government? Me? You? what happens if the sender/recipient are in two different countries? do you pay ‘international’ postage? What if they are on the same ISP, and the message never hits the internet in general? do you still pay? After all… you’re not tying up anyone’s resources except those you’ve already paid for….Nope…Stamps are definitely not a good thing for email… look what the Postal Service’s annual (or at least, felt like annual) increases of a penny for a stamp have done… I don’t think I know anyone who uses the Postal service for more then paying bills now, and thats only those bills that can’t be paid online! charging postage for email will have the same effect on email usage…

Since the CAN-SPAM act amounts to beating the spammers with a wet noodle… maybe we should look for a more realistic law to prevent spamming… the No-Call list has worked for telemarketing (at least for me… we don’t get anywhere near the number of calls we used to), I think a properly ran No-email list could at least reduce the amount of spam floating around. Or, everyone could switch to an email client that has really good SPAM filters in it, and just let them get deleted without ever getting read like I do!