51–52 of 52 posts
In the last couple of months I’ve been receiving enormous amounts of entirely obvious spam to the spam folder on gmail. Like it or not things are misclassified so you need to keep an eye on that folder. I’m now getting 10-20 spam emails a day about bitcoin, missed delivierie etc. it’s as if they have made a decision to not filter those entirely anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem comes from the giants using close source algorithms for mail filtering The root cause is that email is an open messaging network without moderation and sending cost. Other open network is SMS, but because of the sending cost the spam problem is much smaller, albeit still exists.
I'm not much into the whole cryptocurrency hoopla but I've always thought that a digital currency would be the solution to email spam. $.25 fee to send an email and receiver gets the entire fee (or the bulk of it, after what pays for the network) Send more emails than you receive? Send a little bit of emails but get a few replies? It's break even.
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Sending email should be free
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
As mentioned, I don't know if I've really been convinced it can't work, though I'm also not convinced it would (or should, maybe?).
Certainly it doesn't work at all unless transaction costs can be negligible.