Spam

The quickest, easiest way to stop spam, those annoying bulk emails you receive offering you penis enlargements, free vacations, and porn, is to make sending email cost money. I propose a pricing plan equivalent to 1/10 of a penny per email or address. By this I mean that if there is one email address in the to/cc/bcc field of an email, that email costs you 1/10 of a penny. If there are 10 addresss total in your to/cc/bcc fields, that email would cost you one full cent.

For over 90% of the users of the internet this would mean they would spend a few dollars per YEAR on emails. At 1/10 of a penny per address used, $1 would allow you 1,000 (100 cents in a dollar times 10 emails per full cent) addresses. When you look at your Sent list, how often have you reached a thousand emails and how often do you include more than one person on any one email?

However, to a spammer who is generally sending bulk emails to thousands of addresses per email sent or thousands of emails to individual addresses, this adds up quickly. It is my understanding that "small-time" spammers generally send around 10,000 emails a day. At my proposed pricing plan, that would be $10 per day. Over a year, that's $3,650.

A "big-time" spammer, who is typically doing this type of bulk emailing "professionally" using specific softwares and buying email lists from companies, etc., sends 100,000 emails a day or more. That is $100 a day or $36,500 a year. They would need to pay the average American's yearly salary just on one person sending out the average amount of spam per day. Which means, on top of the costs for buying addresses, professional software, etc., they would need to get enough "hits" to make more than that amount per year in order for it to be cost effective.

In a typical day, I receive around 250 bulk emails. Many of these are obviously from professional spammers using multiple incremented email addresses. So, my personal email account is receiving around $.25 of spam per day using my email pricing scheme. If there are around 100 million email users in America, then I would offer a conservative guess that half of them are receiving bulk emails. If I'm average at 250/day, this means that about $12.5 million of spam (using my pricing) is being sent a day. Even if I'm one of the higher targets and the average user is only getting 100 bulk emails a day, that is still around $5 million providers could be charging on emails per day. Or around $1,825,000,000 per year.

Do you really think the spammers will continue at their current rates if they have to pay these fees?