Wednesday, December 13th, 2006...8:04 am...by:
Make Spammers Pay
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How would you like to get paid every time one of those spammy email appear in your inbox? I would. In fact, some people could probably retire on that extra income.
Well, enter Boxbe. This San Francisco based email forwarding company will set you up with a free email address. You then give them a list of approved contacts. Anyone on that list can send you an email for free, just like normal. But, if a sender is not on the list, they have to pay before that email is delivered. Even better, you get to set the price, from 3 cents to $99. Score!
Fight spam with an “opt-in” process… hmmmm (light-bulb illuminates overhead).
2 Comments
December 13th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
While economic solutions to spam are an interesting idea, this is a terrible implementation. It’s a challenge/response scheme. Like all of these things, there’s a fundamental flaw: you can’t reply to spammers — replies go to innocent 3rd parties because spammers forge the return address.
In other words, this actually creates more spam.
More discussion at http://richi.co.uk/
December 13th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
I think that is an interesting point, Richi. I just like it because it is the first economic solution I had seen presented.
Since Boxbe is still new, I am anxious to see some real data on how effective / ineffective it’s service is.
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