You have got mail, paid mail

The free humorous forwards that you used to receive in your inbox at the expense of your's friends organisation bandwidth will soon disappear. Not because your friend's organisation will stop the internet access, but the free email service providers are now thinking to charge a small postage fee for your email.

Leading free email providers Yahoo! and Microsoft (Hotmail) are giving serious thought to charging email senders a small fee.

Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, talked about it last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. consider This is the best weapon to fight the rising tide of spam, or junk email, they think so.

And Yahoo!, according to reports, is evaluating an email payment system developed by Goodmail, a Silicon Valley start-up. The idea of electronic stamp goes down well with major Indian ISPs too.

"A number of approaches are being examined to prevent spam, but the most effective method would be paid email," says V V Kannan, president_interactive services, Satyam Infoway.

According to Brightmail, a company that filters emails for large ISPs like EarthLink, the volume of spam has increased to 60% of emails, from 58% in December. But the user community is highly critical about the monetary approach.

They see it as a trick by ISPs to open up a new revenue stream. Gates tried to allay this fear by talking about a system that would allow users to waive charges for friends and relatives.

The Goodmail system too proposes that only high-volume mailers pay postage at first, at a rate of a penny a message. In fact, fixing the e-stamp rate can prove a tricky issue for the ISPs.

Easier said than done. Some experts expect the e-postage charges to rapidly escalate after starting out small. They point out that the system will affect the non-commercial users like those who run mailing list on technology, science, literature, social issues, human rights etc.

And they worry that big spammers will indeed pay the postage. It's the spammers who are with the big pockets, they say. In fact, the Goodmail system ensures that a 'stamped' email reaches the receiver without having to go through spam filters.

And with the email postage proposed to go to the email recipient's internet provider, it is feared that the ISPs will only promote e-ads. ISPs themselves may become the spammers with full-fledged advertisement divisions, say critics.

They argue that e-postage will not do a single thing to hinder would-be-advertisers. Advertisers pay the post office to deliver their mail, and they'll pay ISPs to do the same. Not convinced? Go out and check your mail box. Congratulations! You've been pre-approved!


Edited by Me. (source:economictimes.com)