Yes, you read that correctly – I want to pay for the e-mail I send. Imagine a scenario where whenever you went to a store and made a purchase, that store began sending you physical mail. At least one per week, sometimes up to one a day. What is worse, some stores sell your address to third parties who send you multiple mailings a day. How could this happen? Only if printing and sending the mail was free. We would be swimming in a sea of paper, and the mail we really wanted to read would be lost in the deluge.

Is it any wonder that we are now engaged in a constant battle to keep our e-mail in-boxes free of spam? Not only does e-mail have no associated cost (other than the initial costs of the computer and bandwidth), but it also takes no money to create the mailing, nor any time to send it to multiple people (perhaps the extra minute to import a list of thousands of addresses). E-mail spam is a severe problem, and not just for the inconvenience. The cost of a spam e-mail is estimated to be $0.10 for the recipient, and only $0.00001 for the sender. Worldwide loss of productivity due to e-mail spam is estimated to be more than $50 billion a year! So really, we’re paying for e-mail today, even those of us who pay a flat fee per month for our access.

Not all spam e-mail is useless. I get a laugh out of one occasionally – my recent video on the subject has a few silly ones:

The reality is that if people out there didn’t actually think that the size of their “meat-stick” could be increased by following the link, or realized that they never actually won the European Union lottery and shouldn’t hand over their bank account info, there would be no incentive for the spammers to continue. Unfortunately, someone is buying the spam (literally and figuratively), so we all pay the price.

Now I am not suggesting that we be charged US Postal Service prices for e-mail. I use it far too much to pay $0.50 per message. Maybe a cool $0.001 per e-mail; I can deal with $1 for 1000 messages. The spammers can’t, though. Not that this is realistic – there is no real way to control the source of e-mail, to standardize how someone pays for it, who they pay, and for what. Plus, we would be setting a nasty precedent in terms of regulating our Internet freedom, and that is one slippery slope that we don’t want to slide down. Yet the thought is nice!

So for now I am considering turning my Ubuntu Server into a mail server for my blog and directing mail there. Linux has some real nice tools available for combatting spam. Gmail is also rather good at filtering spam, and other services such as Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail are getting better. E-mail spam will continue to be one of the prices we pay to ensure net neutrality, at least until someone comes up with a better solution than filtering it at the recipient’s server or client. In the meantime, have fun checking it from time to time – I do. Some of it is hilarious!

Check out Nixie’s blog here and follow her on Twitter!