WHY FREE EMAIL?
For years, people have been proposing a seemingly simple solution to spam: charging for email. My friend Jonathan Rauch got a lot of attention with his articles in National Journal and Slate advocating a pricing solution, but the idea is hardly novel. Here's a 1997 Reason article by Michael Lynch that not only raises the idea but quotes Esther Dyson who'd already been pushing it for several years way back then. (Here's a piece she wrote last year on a company trying to make such a service work.) If it's such a good idea, and everybody has already thought of it, why hasn't it happened? In today's Hit & Run, Jeff Taylor proposed email charges and elicited some comments on the technical problem. He also elicited a lot of Microsoft bashing, but this latest virus is a real pain even for those of us who use Macs. It may not wreck our software, but it sure clutters the inbox. Fortunately, SpamAssassin sends most of my junk to a separate folder.