All email should cost a penny per thousand from Planck's Constant

It's been two years since AOL and Yahoo partnered with Goodmail Systems to offer businesses a way to send "certified" emails that would cost ¼ cent per message that would bypass spam filters. Since that time I have not received one "certified" email but instead I did get over 75,000 spam emails that didn't make it with YAHOO's email filter.

I like the idea but hate the price. The idea is that if spammers had to pay a small fee for millions of emails they would never be able to afford it, and would also need to be investigated and abide by certain rules.

The price, I estimate, should be a penny per thousand. Here's why: at ¼ cent per email, it's too pricey for a small business that needs to legitimately send a few thousand pieces a day to its customers to ensure avoiding spam filters. A thousand pieces a day would cost a small businessman almost a thousand dollars per year. It's even too pricey for big players Amazon or Ebay. However, at one cent per thousand, it would cost the big guys only a few thousand a year to send a million emails a day.

A penny per thousand would kill the spam business since they need to send out tens of millions of emails to get any decent money. A hundred million emails today costs nothing. At $10 per million it would cost spammers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to continue to do business.

At a penny per thousand our small businessman will only have to shell out a few bucks a year. I have no problem with a one-time $50.00 sign up fee for Goodmail Systems to do their bona fides and a deposit to prepay a certain amount of mail.

Typical spam lists contain tens of millions of possible addresses, the majority of them invalid, malformed, undeliverable or expired. Spammers will not pay thousands of dollars a day to reach only a million or so people of which only a small fraction will actually respond. This even assumes that they actually pass the vetting process. And even if a spammer couldn't do the math and decided to try it anyway, the first day that it is discovered that he sent spam his social security, photograph, fingerprint, or whatever Goodmail Systems uses to identify that person, will be tagged as a spammer and will prevent him from doing it another day.

I would like a penny per thousand charged for ALL email. That is, change the whole email system to a prepaid model. I send out about 300 emails a day so it would cost me only a buck a year to inhabit an email system that would be virtually spam free. But at a quarter of a penny a shot it would cost me $273 bucks. Big difference to millions of users.

Some of you may have noticed that I changed my email address from b#####@p####constant.org to a gmail account. That is because I can no longer spend the time looking through hundreds of emails to find my legitimate users. Sometimes I fear I miss an email from a new reader because I did not recognize his address among the hundreds of garbage.

As much as we like the wild wild west of the Internet, the email system is completely broken. Even Dodge City needed to bring in a Marshal when things got really out of hand.

Anybody see a negative to the penny per thousand?