Xanithin3 has been a regular visitor to my inbox but not as frequently as another set of regular spam emails hawking the popular cures for erectile disfuntion. On any given day when I turn my computer on and light up Outlook, ten or twelve versions of this ad await me. They all have in common my email address as the sender and a red exclamation mark to catch my attention. The subject line varies and the message is an HTML picture of the pills that is itself a link. I have never and never will click through to what ever that link is. These emails get past junk filters at the server and on my computer. The senders of this spam continue in spite of anti spamming law and other attempts to stop them with software. From a direct marketing point of view the response to these emails must be tiny but because there is virtually no incremental cost to sending them there is no reason not to send them.
Spamming has inspired all kinds of expensive controls that legitimate marketers must put in place, such as double opt in permissions that it is slowly killing email as a legitimate advertising medium and may kill it as a useful way of communicating.
Paying for email service
What I’d like to propose or invent is a alternative email system that functions more like the post office. When an individual signs up for this service they would set up something like a paypal account that would count all emails sent from that address and charge $.01 per email against an initial deposit. Upon establishing the account the user would also create a profile that included what types of solicitations they would be open too and at what cost to the sender.
As a real estate agent I receive many solicitations and communications from real estate organizations and vendors with tools and schemes “to take you to the next level.” I would establish my price for accepting emails. For solicitations I might set the price at $.05. For “e-flyers” from other agent with properties to market, I might set it at $.03. For the people that I regularily communicate with via email I set it at $.01. The system would take the first $.01 of any email so I would net nothing from my regular associates.
As an email marketer, if I wanted to send a blanket soliciation to anyone who had indicated an interest in real estate, I would establish a maximum price I would pay to land in an email box of a potential receipiant. Any agents at that threshold or below would get my message. The system would report to me the number and percentage of potential receipiants that received the message and my account would be debited for the appropriate amount.
Even at the minimum cost of $.01, spammers, who blanket the earth with billions of Viagra ads would be deterred. The existing system could operate in tandem with this system but would be dominated even more than it is already by spam. But for a nominal cost, serious users of email would be free from the annoying spam that flows freely (literally) into inboxes around the world.
