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Pay for e-mail? Gates says Yes

eclipse525 said:
Trust me, if the government can't tax eMail, they'll try to outlaw it. If the government can't tax it, it's illegal. Gambling and Booze was illegal until the government found a way to make it legal and tax it. That's my rant. 😀
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Booze was I think the first thing seriously taxed in the US. Look up the Whiskey Rebellion.
 
The Solution!

We get spammed because Spam email is pushed. If email were pull then we wouldn't be spammable.

Imagine if you will an email program where you enter a list of people that you want to get email from. You go and you ping their server and if they have mail you retrieve it. When they want to send mail they put it on their server with a code saying that it is addressed to you.

Comments?
 
Should we pay Microsoft for the right to piss and breathe, too? Perhaps that will stop the spread of prostate and lung cancer somehow. After that we can just pay them for the digital rights management for having kids, too.
 
His post office charging for snail mail anaology is flawed. Everyone gets tons o' junk mail through the regular postal service despite stamps. I know that junk is sent at a bulk rate, but once charging for email is introduced its only a matter of time until theres a bulk email rate to bring in more money. Whats wrong with email filters?
 
yeah, what's wrong with filters? Mail.app's junk mail filters have caught every bit of my junk mail...
 
What if the money for the email was actually given to the recipient (put into the recipient's email account). That way if spammers wanted to keep giving away money we'd be happier to get email. Then it would usually balance out if you send and receive about the same number of emails. Companies who have forms to respond to will get 1c from the incoming email and send out 1c for the response. Spammers who get no responses just make our accounts grow until they go out of business and give us some money for the pain in the butt they've been.
 
But if you pull it you have to say who you're pulling from...what if you're getting an email from someone you don't know that you should get. This way you get everything and everything balances out. The only downside I can see to my method is that people whose computers are infected by virii would have to spend a fortune on email. So maybe if the you have a password protected account off the computer that has to be approved before your email is sent. Then if the virus doesn't know the password it can't send the email. I still think it could work.

MongoTheGeek said:
That is one of the advantages of my system where you pull the email. They pay because it sits on their server.
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1macker1 said:
A lot of people bit*h and whine about spam, but when a good solution comes up, all they can do is criticize Billy Gates. Tisk Tisk Tisk.
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People don't like it because it's a bad idea. The fact that it's Bill Gates making the suggestion may not be irrelevant, but after everything he's pulled I think we have a right to be suspicious. Besides, read some of the old posts from when they changed iTools to .Mac. It doesn't matter who says it, even Steve Jobs. People do not want to pay for e-mail.

Well, people don't want to pay for anything, but you pay for internet access anyway. It should be included. And I don't know about you, but people snail mail me junk I don't want all the time. The fact that they have to pay for stamps doesn't seem to bother bulk mailers very much as far as I can tell.
 
I am sure M$ and bill will propose sometime soon that they should be the ones to implement this plan and therefore will have a surcharge for the handling of this service. Then there will be no email support for apple and then bill gates will rule the world as planned
 
phonemonkey said:
I am sure M$ and bill will propose sometime soon that they should be the ones to implement this plan and therefore will have a surcharge for the handling of this service. Then there will be no email support for apple and then bill gates will rule the world as planned
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If this happens to be a serious plan, I hope that everyone will wake up. This would be a plan that should be stopped. It would be a real control issue. 😱
 
Bill can start a pay plan for the Windows platform while Apple and the opensource community can stay with free email and then we will see how many stay loyal to MS and how many realize they don't have to put up with this kind of bull****. Remember the taxes that Britain used to levy against the colonists? Remember the reaction? It's something called the Boston Tea Party and a little something called the American Revolution. It didn't work for Britain and it wouldn't work for MS, either, but let them try it.
 
1macker1 said:
A lot of people bit*h and whine about spam, but when a good solution comes up, all they can do is criticize Billy Gates. Tisk Tisk Tisk.
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How about criticizing his stupid ideas then?
 
solvs said:
Well, people don't want to pay for anything, but you pay for internet access anyway. It should be included. And I don't know about you, but people snail mail me junk I don't want all the time. The fact that they have to pay for stamps doesn't seem to bother bulk mailers very much as far as I can tell.
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Exactly, how many AOL CD's have you got in the mail lately?
Paying for E-mail WONT WORK.
 
You pay between $15-25 per month for AOL and it's the most spam infested e-mail service you can have. I may pay $70 a year for .Mac, but I get a whole lot more than just e-mail and I never once have gotten a single spam e-mail in the 7 months I have been subscribed to it. For those of us who either don't have spam, don't sign up for crap that sends spam, or those who have bought spam filter programs, we sure don't have any reason to pay for e-mail to reduce spam. Besides, who is this money being sent to? If it is anywhere near Redmond, I will just stick to IMs and my cellphone, unless Bill wants to charge us per IM, too. While we are at it, let's put a quarter slot in all new PCs so you have to pay a quarter everytime you restart or turn on your PC. They can have minions of Bill come weekly to empty it and collect on your toll.
 
It's easy to stop spam. Just buy everything they try to sell you. Eventually, the people selling amazingly cheap mortgages and viagra and spy-on-your-spouse services and all the other other fine products and services will be so rich they will retire and stop sending you spam! 🙂

But seriously, this is not a get-richer-quick scheme by Microsoft. It is a legitimate suggestion for a way to combat spam, and there aren't many other plans with a chance of success.

I don't like the idea of having solve-a-math-puzzle be the way to pay postage, since it favors big-bucks businesses too much over regular folks. So hard cash is the way to buy e-mail postage. Note that there has to be a foolproof way to prove that a message has postage on it, which I assume would be with digital signatures from a postal authority you choose to trust.

Nobody would be forced to participate in such a program. If you want to accept e-mail with no postage, you can continue to do so. You determine your tolerance level. Many people would choose to allow incoming messages only if they had postage or were on a personal whitelist (a junk mail rule that says "accept mail from this particular source").

I suggest something else that would help too: Right now, people can put a "bookmark this page" button or a "make this your home page" button on a web page. With the same ease of use, I'd like to see web browsers and e-mail clients develop a feature where you could click "whitelist this e-mail address" or "whitelist this domain" to add a rule to the junk mail filter with a simple click and a confirmation dialog box. That way, when you sign up for yet another e-mail service or online forum, you would do something simple to exempt that site from being filtered by your junk mail filter and its "postage" setting.
 
It isn't a question of "giving" out your address. There are companies whose sole business is finding addresses and selling them to spammers. Many university account addresses, for example, are open searchable lists. It just is a matter of time before your once "private" email is found, sold, and used.
 
1macker1 said:
I think it's a GREAT idea to fight spam. I like the idea of letting the user decided the cost of someone sending them a email. For friends and family it would be .01 cents, but the price would be set much higher for all those people(compaines) sending male inhancement emails.🙂
Of course there is still much work to be done, should missing children emails be charged....NO. I'm sure they'll work out something. But this is a start.
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a viable solution to spam is here www.cashette.com they have a list that you put your approved mailers on anyone not on that list is junk which after a few days is deleted if you see junk mail that is not you just click making them approved pretty well thought out
 
1macker1 said:
A lot of people bit*h and whine about spam, but when a good solution comes up, all they can do is criticize Billy Gates.
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Maybe you're right. But I would submit the possibility that Bill want's to charge money so he can have the funds to develop a spam and virus-free environment, when in fact the virus issue is a result of him not taking care of the OS and Apps that allow that to happen.
I haven't really thought about it much... we DO pay 39 cents for regular mail... But the net is an open environment. We MUST strive to keep out the charges and therefore the CONTROL of it. Information is CRUCIAL in this day and age. Control of same will mean big companies deciding what we should see, like the neo-con outfit ClearChannel.
 
Powerbook G5 said:
Bill can start a pay plan for the Windows platform while Apple and the opensource community can stay with free email and then we will see how many stay loyal to MS and how many realize they don't have to put up with this kind of bull****. Remember the taxes that Britain used to levy against the colonists? Remember the reaction? It's something called the Boston Tea Party and a little something called the American Revolution. It didn't work for Britain and it wouldn't work for MS, either, but let them try it.
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I like your idea Powerbook G5. So if Apple maintained an open source community with free E.Mail then Apple's market share would increase? At some point we need to heed the call of the colonist's in Boston to say no to an ever increasing tax burden. It seems that every time you turn around that increase or charge a new fee for internet use, cell phone, and telephone.
 
Legitimate businesses that send e-mail to their customers send more e-mail than individuals, so they would have to budget more for their e-stamps. But I think they might still favor the system, because businesses are currently paying their employees for the time it takes to sift spam out of their business e-mail inboxes, so they would benefit in the spam-free world too.
 
I think I have an alternative to email, and everyone here at MR uses it - FORUMS. We communicate every day through this forum, both publicly and privately by sending private messages to other members. A lot of people check their email online via some sort of web mail system, so what would be different than using a forum to communicate with friends and family?

Of course, there would have to be secure web sites with forum capabilities to block out unwanted visitors, but there are many free or low cost hosting companies that could provide such a service.

Another draw back would be for different groups of people, such as a persons family, friends, coworkers, and so on. A person would have to go to several sites to check for responses to thier posts and see what is new.

If it comes down to paying for email or using forums, I'd go with the forums.
 
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