The Problem with Email is that it's Free

Physical junk mail can be a problem - but it rarely approaches the problem many people have with spam. My physical mailbox commonly gets about 3 legitimate items each day and around 3 pieces of junk e-mail. I suspect this is fairly representative of what most people get. At a 50 to 50 ratio, it's a nuisance, but a minor one at most.

In contrast, my electronic mailbox gets about 10 legitimate messages daily, with about 250 junk emails. That's a 1 to 25 ratio. Without spam email blocker software like SpamButcher, my inbox would be beyond usefulness.

So what's the difference? Email is free, or at least very close to it. The cost of sending a legitimate email message is tiny. In many cases it's well below 1/100 of one cent. Internet bandwidth is nearly too cheap to meter (unlike electricity was once promised to be).

Commercial physical mail is (very) roughly 500 times more expensive than that. The cost of sending out junk letters by the thousands is quite real; businesses have to target their advertising at customers who just might purchase. No one could ever get rich sending millions of letters out at random to individuals pitching male potency drugs.

Many individuals including Bill Gates have advocated a revised email protocol that would allow for electronic "postage". The article Paying for Email with Computational Time outlines some possible ways to move towards this approach towards stopping spam email.

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