[wahern]

If snail mail cost $0.001 per recipient people would be getting much, much more junkmail. Likewise, if e-mail cost as much as even bulk snail mail, there'd be much less spam.

Some sort of payment scheme is really the best, most durable option. The problem of mailing-lists and personal correspondence could be solved by an exclusion mechanism where the recipient effectively whitelists senders, explicitly or implicitly (e.g. whitelist a replying-sender automatically if a recipient initiates a conversation).

[ryandrake]

The problem with a payment scheme is that spammers (who make money by spamming) will happily pay as a cost of doing business (or negotiate discounts/deals), but Joe User might just look at the cost and say, "you know what, maybe I'll send this as SMS instead of E-mail."

So the end result will be more spam and fewer legit E-mails.

[stevenicr]

I've wondered if it cost $10 to get through my email box the first two times what they would mean.

Hormozi could charge $1,000 to get into his read box.

We could refund people, add them to a whitelist - and return a 405? payment required by default and things change in interesting ways when the amount is variable.

[grodriguez100]

There are platforms based on this idea: pay to reach a public person’s inbox, often with guaranteed responses (“guaranteed” as in “you get a response or you money back”). For example: https://mypublicinbox.com/en/