Email tacks

Rob Bray suggests a different tack to take for spam prevention/reduction.

Rob blogged about his resistance to the penny tax for emails that Tim Bray suggested in a recent blog post. In this installment, however, he changes his mind and instead comes up with a brilliant solution: only un-answered emails cost you anything. Most of us write emails to people and receive answers from those same people; spammers on the other hand send emails to thousands of people and only a few (idiots) reply. If we could make it really costly to send un-answered emails and cheap to send answered emails we might have the beginnings of a really nice, low-tech solution.

This suggestion of Rob's reminds me of a socio-economic system called Stone Society described by Peter Merel. The system involves creating an artificial resource that is then exchanged and manipulated by participants in order to allow decision-making to proceed.

In the world that Rob describes, you would exchange tokens freely with people with whom you have a back-and-forth. Spammers would simply send you tokens which you could accumulate. In other words, spam would be beneficial to you even if you didn't want to receive it.

If the tokens here were indeed pennies you would actually get paid to receive spam. You could still have email filters to make sure you don't have to read it. This plan is all about raising the barrier to entry for spammers.