I’ve been pondering how one may be able to get rid of spam. Not just what comes into my mailbox, but most spam everywhere. And I found such a simple solution it’s amazing I haven’t heard of it before. But of course it will never happen, so that probably explains it.

Spammers rely on that sending even extremely large volumes of spam is nearly free. It takes some effort to find a nice relay and/or create a small botnet, but following that every message a spammer sends is free. I don’t have the statistics handy, but the ‘positive’ response to spam is something like one for every hundred thousand messages sent.

Now imagine it cost five cents to deliver an email. That means to send 100k of messages the spammer would have to pay 5000$, which would make the business not feasible. How easy a solution is that!

And yeah, I know – gmail filters all the spam for you, and the wrong infrastructure is there, and some people would actually mind paying 5 cents to send an email, but I think it’s a great idea anyway, even though it is unlikely to happen in this form in my lifetime.