Well, let's start with the fact that not everyone uses GMail or Chrome. A lot of people atually stick with mail clients. You remember them? They're the programs designed for reading email, rather than just using a web front-end.
The solution doesn't have to support all platforms and all browsers from day 1. Support for other browsers and other email providers can be added later.
Let's put it this way; should you ever implement this, I'll be
impressed if you get it working with Mutt of Gnus.
Then there's the offensiveness of the idea. I don't see why I should have to pay to prove that my email isn't spam. Especially when I already have a GPG signature to prove which emails I have really sent.
Some people receive 100s of "legitimate" emails a day (Personally I'm at about a 100 a day), and can't possibly respond to them all. This is simply a way to ensure emails get top priority.
Saturday the 14th was a very light day for my email. According to my logs Postfix (my MTA) transferred:
6100051 bytes transferred
397 messages sent
397 messages removed from queue
This does not count the amount of spam that was blocked by other systems or methods (e.g. greylisting, Amavis, blacklists, etc.) before Postfix accepted the message for delivery.
Note: those figures include anything I sent and received on that day, the log report is from the server's point of view.
No need to get offended, you don't have to use the system.
You do realise that your proposal is basically an attempt to make this old hoax a reality, right? a hoax which has since been seriously suggested by both American and UK politicians.
You can read more on the various types of Internet taxes here.
I'll still read emails from you ... only, whenever I have time to clean my inbox, and not as necessarily as soon as they arrive.
There's a much easier way which has been available for decades: filtering mail into folders. I can very easily see where all my mail has come from and know which lists to ignore at any given time. Plus it works for everything i receive, not just a small subset which happen to use one particular service, program or plug-in.
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Furthermore, email should be free to send and receive and should remain so. Your little plan is basically another method of opposing Net Neutrality.
This has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. The whole NN issue is about someone else prioritizing content for you, while my idea is about letting you prioritize your own content.
Your description indicated that the plugin would prioritise mail in your inbox according to whether the sender included a payment. Which means they're paying for your eyeballs.
(Besides, I'm not sure NN is justified, but that's off topic to this thread)
I hope you enjoy your segregated little walled garden. Once you're there for long enough you really won't know what you're missing.
Oh, in case you think I'm exaggerating, there's Verizon's law suit which says other wise.
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Finally, it won't make any difference to the amount of spam being transmitted. Spam is generated and countered at a level that a browser plug-in will barely touch. Would I be correct in assuming you've never managed a mail server?
I have never managed a mail server, that is correct. I still don't understand your argument.
You don't even see a fraction of a percent of the spam that is careening around the Internet in search of a gullible reader. The spam which does manage to get through does so because it generally looks (to the filtering systems) like a real message. Rather than simply ignoring it and focussing on the email you were paid to read, you could use the spam (or phishing attempt) to improve the filters by reporting it to a blacklist like spamcop.net.
Your method might reduce the spam you see at first, but it won't affect the amount that is transmitted. Eventually, though, the spammers will catch on and realise that they can pay some insignificant amount (e.g. 0.00000001 BTC) to be sure their email gets through.
Alternatively they may be able to spoof the mark, depending on how it is added to an email. Was your plan to modify the headers to add one for the plug-in to read (plenty of programs do this, such as mailing lists)? Or was the plan to add this special mark into the body of the message? Or was it to add the mark as an attachment of some kind?
I rely on the in-place spam filters, so I don't have to handle the shitload of spam, only the spam/less interesting emails that somehow bypass the current spam filtering systems.
Yeah, whereas I run my own server and I know exactly what those anti-spam systems are doing and, more importantly, how they are improved from the minuscule amount of spam which makes it through.
Seriously, there is a lot of work being done around the world to try to get rid of it, just as there are hosts of botnets sending the spam. 90% or more of the spam sent to a server that originates from these botnets and compromised hosts is stopped by greylisting rules before any filters, blacklists or other domain/delivery checks kick in.
This idea won't do anything to help that particular fight. It just provides senders using your system to pay for the attention of recipients using your system. So trying to pitch this as a system that will stop spam is, at the very least, disingenuous.
