The Spam Wars.

• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

Wendy Grossman's "The Spam Wars" (November) was interesting and informative. However, I believe that the economic methods for fighting spare were given short shrift. One of the reasons the "penny per e-mail" method is too often dismissed is that there's not much discussion of exactly where that penny goes. The sender pays a penny, but who gets it? The right answer to that question can mitigate some of the problems Grossman mentions: The penny should go to the owner of the ISP that delivers the e-mail to the final recipient, so that, in effect, an ISP charges others to deliver e-mail to its customers.

Grossman objects that no ISP is set up to charge this way. But 10 years ago, no ISP in the world was set up to validate relayed e-mail or to filter spare. Now both practices are common. This required changes to mail-server software, and adding a "sender pays" system would not be much different.

She argues that it would require an entirely new infrastructure for the industry. But we already have most of the pieces of such an infrastructure, including Internet credit card payments, Internet bill payments, PayPal, and similar services. I've just noticed that even Yahoo! will let me attach money to this e-mail via their "Yahoo! PayDirect from HSBC."

Grossman also worries that "sender pays" would kill free services such as Yahoo! and Hotmail. This is simply one additional cost added to their existing costs. Yahoo! and Hotmail already have to pay for computers, hard disks, bandwidth, and personnel. It's all funded from their advertising. However, at the same time, it is an additional stream of income. Yahoo! and Hotmail will receive a penny for each e-mail they deliver to their customers. They'd probably throw away all their spam filtering software the day such a system is put into place!

Further, the penny doesn't have to be paid immediately upon receiving e-mail. The larger ISPS could easily set up accounts where payments could be made monthly based on the actual auditable number of e-mails. This easily solves the issues of "fractional penny" payments and addresses concerns about massive additional e-mail traffic for processing payments.

Would such a system make mailing lists economically unfeasible? Any mailing list can simply require that each recipient send an e-mail back to the main server for each e-mail they receive. The list can send out 10,000 e-mails to 10,000 customers at a cost of $100. Each of 10,000 recipients sends an acknowledgement...