Comment by addaon
15 hours ago
I still think the missing opportunity with e-mail was for the USPS (back in the US-dominant internet days) to take a leading role and implement "e-stamps." Provide a subscription service that managed a per-user account, cost a 1¢ stamp to send a message, and guaranteed delivery of messages received with a 1¢ stamp on them -- with the received stamp value being put in the user's account, so a user who received more mail than they sent would never spend a penny. (Messages received from other services could be rejected, delivered, or binned for later inspection at the user's discretion.) This would have the obvious downside of centralizing a major early-Internet feature (although federation is certainly possible as well), but it would have the upside of penalizing companies sending millions of e-mails, but not users using it for person-to-person communication, or companies using it for per-(valuable)-customer communication. We could have had a world without spam… and if USPS took 10% off the top (0.9¢ of each incoming message given to the user account), or similar, I could imagine it having a big impact on their budgetary issues.
The physical usps works because, the usps controls every inbox and every outbox; everyone has to have an inbox/outbox with the single carrier, and no one can actually reject or refuse mail. All the downsides of iMessage but the government reading your email bc it's not an encrypted protocol. Spam exists in the real world, this wouldn't have worked either
> Spam exists in the real world, this wouldn't have worked either.
A two-or-more order-of-magnitude reduction in a problem seems like a good start and a worthwhile step, not something to disregard because it's not 100%…
The USPS is paid by spammers to ensure delivery of their physical spam. You doing think they wouldn't have also accepted payment from spammers to ensure delivery of their internet spam?
1 reply →
Yes. I don't know if this is exactly the recipe, but something akin to this could have .. no should have .. existed. Probably 1¢ is too much. Also, full public key encryption and digital signatures should be easily integrated by now as well. I know the whole trust problem ... yadda yadda ... I don't even read my email hardly at all anymore -- I want everyone that needs to get a hold of me don't rely on email.
I found the artificial cost ideas interesting at the time but I think the Ad landscape shows that it doesn't really work. All but the least sinister scammers would happily pay pretty well and have to be prevented from buying ads unless financial regulations could prevent any kind of laundering proceeds back into more ads.
It's worth noting the difference between a fixed cost for sending a message, and a fixed inventory of messaging, and an auction bid system where bids are maximized by competition unless bidders form a cartel.
Funnily enough, if collusion is prohibited, the goal of such a law would be more competition, but the result is more mergers and monopolies, up until the point where antitrust kicks in and ad-hoc limits the monopoly, so each industry ends up with 1 bidder, or 2-3 tops
> We could have had a world without spam
I doubt it. USPS charges everyone to send snail mail, and I get plenty of spam in my mailbox. I end up with way more spam in my snail mailbox than in my email inbox, since the latter has filtering.
Not sure it was a big missed opportunity to create a communication protocol that...financially penalizes communication?
Sounds like a really fast way to kill a network instead of grow it into a 4B daily active user staple like email is today. You'd basically ensure that email would ONLY be spam, because marketers would be the only ones willing spend money to reach people.
Every time I see someone suggest micropayments on HN I have to wonder if people here have any understanding of how actual humans are. Turning every action on your network into a purchase decision is a good way to ensure nobody ever does anything on your network and thus it never becomes a network.
Humans will always gravitate toward the lowest friction way to achieve their goals. So immediately some private company would introduce a free communication channel as a loss leader instead, theirs would grow faster, and then they'd monetize via ads once their network reached critical mass (see also, whatsapp). Killing the more egalitarian decentralized protocol in the process.
Not all communication has positive value. 99.9% of the e-mail I receive not only has no value in itself, but the overhead of managing it, ignoring it, and categorizing it is highly negative -- and decreases the value of the valuable e-mail I receive, because I can't be arsed to check it promptly or consistently because of the overhead of the dreck. But as others point out, even charging money would only reduce spam by an order of magnitude or two, not entirely -- and since I send 1 - 10 actual e-mails a week, I only need to receive a dozen a week to never pay a penny.
My primary goal is not to send e-mail for free -- my primary goal is to have reliable, low-overhead communication with humans. Having this sponsored by spammers is a fine start, but even if I paid a dollar a year or so, that would be much lower overhead than even a day's worth of looking through spam is today (at the rate I value my time -- but even if you value your time orders of magnitudes less, the payoff is there).
This is what Xanadu and OSI were going to deliver: real world pay services recast on electronic networks. That could never compete against unmetered communication delivered by the likes of FidoNet, Compuserve, and the open internet protocols.
[dead]
My physical mailbox full of junk mail says that spam would still exist.
3 or 4 items, sure. But my email account gets several hundred per day.
And yet, when the USPS did deliver email (via paper, no less, with their E-COM system), over half of the message volume was sent by one mass-mailer: https://buttondown.com/blog/the-e-com-story
Afraid the spammers will always be with us.
Have you heard about hashcash? They propose a novel similar mechanism for postage for email with some interesting theoretical consequences.