
Email Stamps to Solve Spam - sant0sk1
http://adam.blog.heroku.com/past/2008/11/17/email_stamps_to_solve_spam/
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brk
Wow, it's been a while since a pay-to-send email mechanism has been floated
about. They all seem to fail long before implementation, and for many of the
same reasons.

One of the biggest reasons is that you can already get 99% of this effect for
free today. There are a number of services and options where any email that
comes from an unknown sender is quarantined by a system, which sends an email
to the unknown sender. This email contains some instructions, perhaps to click
a link, or solve a simple math problem, or some other such gating factor that
makes it near impossible for the common spammer to invest the effort to
circumvent the system in any reliable way.

~~~
sfk
And systems like qsecretary tend to provoke reactions like this:

[http://www.ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/namedroppers.2003...](http://www.ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/namedroppers.2003/msg00051.html)

~~~
brk
Yes. Any mishandled whitelisting system is going to produce responses similar
to the one in your link.

I imagine the author would be even more outraged if he had to pay 5cents
multiple times to get past a poorly implemented spam block.

------
jumper
Honestly, even if this sorta works and you somehow magically get everyone into
it, we had and still have spam in the form of physical mail. At 5 cents it
sounds like email spam will still be cheaper than that. ...I am now very
tempted to scream 'fail'.

