Imagine 9 out of 10 emails being spam?

I've always been an advocate of introducing a small (say 1p per recipient) charge for sending emails.  A not-for-profit organisation would administer the scheme, and profits could be donated to charity.  Spammers would think twice if sending an email to 10000 addresses cost them £100.

I would happily take the 1p and provide a solution, however I think that paying a fee may not simply stop it, it may just lead to more fraud in order to pay for it, but who knows. One thing I am sure of is that things need to change. Authentication of users is the real problem with the internet, I'm all for anonymity, but not without accountability.

While the news that the internet will reach capacity sometime in the next two years, and spam is part of the problem, I don't expect that reducing spam will suddenly give the internet the capacity required for the future. Some carriers are already 'tailoring' traffic and not just to stop skypers. This does not bode well for social networking sites and video sites such as Youtube, unless they use a lot more local storage. The social  sites will lose visitors if they censor their footage to try to minimise the amount of rubbish flying around, but as much of it is humorous and we all need a good laugh I'd like to see it continue, but there is a limit. Spam is the obvious standout target.

The fines for spamming should represent the cost number of man hours required by the average human to read it (every single message they sent) and the cost of defending against it, but without authentication who do you prosecute?

After all 1p is still a lot of money to billions of people. I'm still amazed that so many dummies pay so much for the SMS's they send each other, it's a bit like the credit card industry. $1.50 per megabyte for data transmission charges would not go down well in any other arena and considering there are 3 times as many mobile users as there are internet users there's obviously one born every minute...so perhaps they'll go for 1p per email.