Comment by ebcode
9 hours ago
What if a single email cost $0.001 cent to send, and it was paid to the recipient? For $10, you could send 10,000 emails. For recipients, every 1,000 emails they get is a dollar in their wallet. You’d need something like a blockchain for this to work because the traditional payment processors still haven’t figured out micropayments.
> What if a single email cost $0.001 cent to send, and it was paid to the recipient? For $10, you could send 10,000 emails. For recipients, every 1,000 emails they get is a dollar in their wallet.
I'm not sure you realize your proposal's only contribution is to worsen spam. You are unwittingly creating an incentive for email providers to lift anti-abuse filters and to maximize the volume of spam delivered to you.
If snail mail cost $0.001 per recipient people would be getting much, much more junkmail. Likewise, if e-mail cost as much as even bulk snail mail, there'd be much less spam.
Some sort of payment scheme is really the best, most durable option. The problem of mailing-lists and personal correspondence could be solved by an exclusion mechanism where the recipient effectively whitelists senders, explicitly or implicitly (e.g. whitelist a replying-sender automatically if a recipient initiates a conversation).
The problem with a payment scheme is that spammers (who make money by spamming) will happily pay as a cost of doing business (or negotiate discounts/deals), but Joe User might just look at the cost and say, "you know what, maybe I'll send this as SMS instead of E-mail."
So the end result will be more spam and fewer legit E-mails.
I've wondered if it cost $10 to get through my email box the first two times what they would mean.
Hormozi could charge $1,000 to get into his read box.
We could refund people, add them to a whitelist - and return a 405? payment required by default and things change in interesting ways when the amount is variable.