[blueplastic]

E-mail is so broken fundamentally, that it's not even funny. I'm surprised more people aren't trying to replace it.

E-mail's based on the idea that it is free to message me and bother me and take a few precious seconds of my stream of consciousness.

If it's free to email people, then of course spammers will flood email channels with their deals and scams.

Ideally, I want a communications platform where only my 200 or so friends, co-workers and friends of friends can message me for free. Anybody else who wants to contact me has to send the message with a $1 bitcoin (interrupting my stream of conciousness price would be custom set by me, so lil' wayne would probably set his price at $75).

If the message from a stranger I got was in fact a cool dude I met at a party last weekend following up on that cat picture, then I'd click "reply and return" to give him back that bitcoin. If I see that the message is from a prince, I'd just ignore it and go buy some gum or something with his precious $1.

The current horrible e-mail architecture feeds giants like gmail, microsoft, yahoo b/c everyone is going to get tons of junkmail and people around 1999 had to start moving to cloud based providers who did free spam detection to parse through people's emails (Outlook Express sucked at spam cleaning). Problem is the web giants are snorting in everyone's private communications. It's as if the US Postal Service offered to deliver all mail for free, but in exchange opened everything and read it and if they thought this is something you shouldn't read or if this is marketing propaganda, so they won't deliver it to the recipient. I think pretty much everyone would think that's a crappyly architected postal service, but I guess with email we shouldn't be thinking about those kinds of things. Let's just figure out some new technical protocol instead, after IMAP and POP and SMTP will be replaced by SPDY or RESTful HTTP right? Yeah, let's build that instead.

True, e-mail is a universal platform, but it sucks.

[hammock]

I understand your dislike of spam, but what's the rationale behind building in the filtration into the architecture? That's merely a constraint on what email already offers, not an evolution.

Right now spam filtration is decentralized (as it should be), and there's NOTHING stopping an email provider like Gmail or Hotmail or [fill in your new startup] from CHARGING senders a fee to actually deliver mail to your personal inbox.

If you think your charge-per-message makes sense, then build your own email server that intercepts incoming messages and makes sure they've been paid for before distributing them to you (or your customers). No one is stopping you.

[hammock]

By the way, if there WAS a centralized spam filtration somewhere, as you seem to be proposing, there would still be "a giant" snooping everyone's mail. Or did you not realize that.

[jonmrodriguez]

hammock, blueplastic didn't say to centralize spam filtration. He said to make messages cost money, thus making spamming unprofitable. This is totally different from the machine-learned-model-reads-all-my-mail situation that we have now AND totally different from a centralized Big Brother antispam agency.

[blueplastic]

Thanks, Jon. That's exactly what I meant.

[akrymski]

Email is a collection of protocols stacked on top of each other, so when we're talking about replacing email you have to be specific about which part you'd like replaced. DNS? SMTP layer? IMAP layer? application / email client layer? spam filtering layer?

What you're suggesting is indeed something that can be,and will be, added to email. But there's nothing wrong in email at a lower level (SMTP say) thats preventing someone from setting this up. One thing that definitely sucks is IMAP though, would love to see that replaced by a restful protocol. But we have no alternative to a ubiquitous distributed and open messaging system that is SMTP.

[kooshball]

> It's as if the US Postal Service offered to deliver all mail for free, but in exchange opened everything and read it and if they thought this is something you shouldn't read or if this is marketing propaganda, so they won't deliver it to the recipient.

USPS has a large list of Restricted Matters that you're not allowed to send. It's ridiculous to think they would never "inspect" your package in anyway.

[Auguste]

The only place I have seen where people are able to set a fee on "email" that is sent to them is in EVE Online, where I believe it was introduced to stop spam. I'd never thought of it in the real world before, but now that you mention it, I wonder how well it could work. Unfortunately, it may be a little bit too late to introduce it now.

[losvedir]

It's a good idea, though not a new one. Bill Gates suggested this very idea in his book The Road Ahead. I must have read it 15 years ago when I was in elementary school and have always wondered why no one's gone ahead and implemented it.

[sliverstorm]

It sounds like you are asking for Facebook?

[blueplastic]

wtf