In for a penny

I'm going to go on record, in what I'm sure will be a break with most people, as being against the idea of charging postage for email. Initially, I wasn't too against it - how many emails do I send? If they charged my a penny an email, it would cost me, at most, 2 bucks a month - on a busy month. It would be worth that amount to decrease the 'increase the size of your penis' emails I get every day. (Honestly, I was starting to doubt that I was able to measure up.)

Of course, ideal solutions never work an ideal way. Let's start with some philosophical problems:

First of all, I already pay for my email. I pay almost 50 bucks a month for my DSL line, which includes email. While the amount would be small, it bugs me having to pay more for service I already have. Also, while I drool at the idea of spam companies getting million dollar bills, the fact is that the vast majority of those effected will not be spammers. They would be regular companies / people.

And, of course, it would cause more problems than it resolves. We already know that spammers are taking over people's computers, to send spam out from there. That process would likely continue, meaning that now there would be a wave of people getting charged for emails they were duped into sending for spammers.

Also, spammers are incredibly smart. Every time I update my Outlook to block messages like 'viagra' or 'Add 3+ inches', I get a new wave of spam, this time selling 'Vi@gra' or '3+ inches is what you can add'. My point? Spammers would find away to avoid paying. Microsoft can't keep them from hijacking Windows, what makes a reasonable person think that they could keep any of this from being hijacked.