[rixthefox]

I disagree. I don't believe that would solve spam you would just force the spammers to use much more aggressive tactics. If you introduce a fee to email you're only hurting the people who actively communicate back and forth via email as a primary method. Mailing lists anyone?

Spammers will take your $0.02 fee per email as an operational expense. Most spam is not sent by the spammers themselves from their own servers but are instead relayed through a third party who handles the delivery part on their behalf who are paid money to run these spam campaigns through their servers instead anyways so they are already paying a fee, this is just an extra cost on top of what they are already paying to do it.

[plagiarist]

How much is the cost of the third party now compared to how much it would be when there is a 2 cent per email overhead?

I had a look at legit services, Sender will let me do 30k emails at around $15/mo. If I can assume that's representative, I only need the profit multiplied by probability of a sale to beat $0.0005 to make money. If I had to beat $0.02, I would need to increase the odds, perhaps by sending only to interested parties. Or somehow drastically increase my profit margins by 40x without reducing the probability of a sale.

We would simply have far less spam with a per email fee.

[ryukafalz]

> If you introduce a fee to email you're only hurting the people who actively communicate back and forth via email as a primary method. Mailing lists anyone?

So don't require a stamp for email sent from one of your contacts, or from a mailing list you're subscribed to. No reason email from everyone in the world needs to be treated equally.