Postage for E-Mail?

Since Bill Gates predicted the death of spam back in January, there has been some interesting debate as to whether ISPs will eventually start charging ‘postage’ for email. Both Yahoo and Microsoft are thinking of implementing a fee for email – the details of which haven’t been worked out.

An article in the NY Times mentioned that Yahoo is in talkes with start up Goodmail that will require anyone sending email addressed to Yahoo email addresses to include some type of postage. Hopefully this will cut back on spam – spammers won’t want to pay…

Hans-Peter Brøndmo recently wrote an article at Clickz.com detailing the arguments for and against ‘postage’ for email. Some points:

• MA-based, Vanquish proposes that senders post a bond, and senders charge them for their messages to get through. If they want to receive the mail, they can choose to accept it without charge.
• Start up, Goodmail proposes inserting stamps in email & the receiving gateway determines whether to charge the sender
• Will adding postage stop spammers? People still get junk mail & that costs money.
• ISPs may start charging to stop spam from reaching your inbox
• Charging may slow down the free flow of information – free services like personal list servs and university alumni email forwarding may end up paying high weekly postage fees.

Rebecca Lieb added some thoughts to the discussion today in her Clickz.com column – what to do about bots, viruses, and just disgruntled spammers who pose as legitimate companies?

It’s still to early to tell where this is going, but the idea is out there and Microsoft is working to make it happen.

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