Email Payments
Tim Bray recently posted thoughts on the Spam Problem:
The solution is straightforward: create a new kind of business, a relayer.
It operates a really big password-protected SMTP relay. It sends email from anybody to anybody for 1¢ ($0.01) each. You open an account with them, drop in say $10 and you’ve bought the rights to send 1,000 emails.
Every email that it sends it signs digitally. Then, you set up your email client to send all email that hasn’t been signed by SMTP4All or one of its competitors (there couldn’t be more than a couple of hundred) to the junk folder. Then you tell your friends to go and sign up with one of these guys if they want you to get their mail.
This reminds me of a cryptography talk I heard at DefCon (last year I believe) during which it was suggested that this strategy be taken with one big difference: The payment wouldn’t be an actual payment but a guarantee of payment. For email that you value (from a friend, say), you just read it and do as you normally would without dealing with the payment guarantee because, honestly, who wants to be charged money to talk with a friend? The payment is guaranteed though, so any email that you consider unsolicited and unwanted can be cashed in.
I might be getting part of this wrong (I believe the original idea didn’t involve a central relayer), but I like the idea. The micropayment issue is the hurdle, but it sounds good to me.
(If anyone has citation information for the DefCon talk I’m referring to, post a comment below.)