Yahoo! is researching a pay-per-email system called CentMail, which would require senders to pay a penny for every email sent to Yahoo! servers in hopes of reducing spam. The twist is that the one cent “stamp” would go to charity. There are many questions that go unanswered, even in the 10 page case study CentMail provides on their website. What happens if an email bounces? If there is no “stamp,” do the emails get dropped? Will Yahoo! senders need the stamp to send to another Yahoo! user? Is this just a ploy for Yahoo! to pass expenses to senders under the guise of reducing spam?
Spam is a problem, yes. It is dangerous due to trojans, viruses, 63 year old women who open and click on every piece of email they receive, and the morons who continually give money to Nigerian princes. That being said, spam filters and junk mail folders are getting better at capturing actual spam. Check out your Gmail spam folder next time you log on: rarely do those male anatomy enlargement offers or free Viagra pills actually get through. Nay, a vast majority of what gets through to the inboxes are newsletters and offers that people inadvertently signed up for when they got the “free” $5 Starbucks gift card or signed up to play Flash games on that website. That is not spam: No, good reader, that is you opting in, forgetting that you did, and then complaining.
Why do Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google offer “free” email services? They want your information and what you talk about in email so they market to you. The “payment” for you to use that service is ads. Yahoo! isn’t letting Netflix and Bank of America spam me with ads for free (by the way, where is my “This is Spam” button for the ads, hypocrites?).
Yahoo! wants me to pay for my ads in my email...for charity
Spam is a cost of doing business for ESPs. If Yahoo! forces everyone (including private senders) to pay actual currency for sending to their servers, then they are essentially asking senders to pay for the spam filtering and hosting of the message, which is part of the Yahoo! mail service and you STILL get the ads. Paint me pink and call me crazy, but with the price of memory dropping to almost zero and Yahoo! offering unlimited email storage, I doubt that it costs Yahoo! a penny to house that email.
Even though there are reports claiming that between 90-97% of all email sent globally is spam (which I don’t believe), 89-96% of that is harmless or ignored.* Spam costs the receiver essentially nothing, especially if they are using a free internet connection (in a public library or at work) and a free email service (such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail) except the annoyance of deleting or unsubscribing from the message. Spam is costing is the free email providers money, because they are housing all of that crap.
Conveniently, the email service providers, the authentication services, and the makers of spam filter software are the people funding and releasing the spam studies. Yahoo!, ReturnPath, Symantec, and Goodmail wouldn’t define spam as broadly as possibly to make another buck, would they?
“But charity gets that penny, and I love charity.” you say. But what if, in the future, Yahoo! needs cash? Also, in the United States, when getting something in return for a charitable donation, the value of the product received cannot be deducted from taxes. Will Yahoo! give an actual value for the cost of the storage of the email? This would be necessary for large B2C companies that marketing to Yahoo! mail users. And if so, why not just charge that $0.00000001 per email directly to the companies?
(Not only would businesses be pissed, but can you imagine the uproar and push back from the free email users if their friends stopped emailing them because it cost money? People leave Yahoo! because they have to pay for POP3 access- unless you go around the system. People were pissed when Facebook changes its look or its policies for free services rendered. Paying to get emails to a server? My Yahoo! friends would never get that YouTube clip** from me again. People would bolt for Gmail even faster than they currently are.)
While I am all for reducing spam, I don’t believe CentMail is the answer. Since its inception, email has promoted free communication due to the economics and environment on which the Internet was created, for better or worse. Normal economic thought points out that monetizing sending would deter spammers, but it would also deter legitmate users and drive them to other options, and the internet has never really followed traditional economics. Other plans, such as Microsoft’s (yes, the Evil Empire) Penny Black plan are much better and don’t cost normal senders anything.
* this is from my personal research
** This YouTube Clip. My mom used to buy me GoBots because we were poor and couldn’t afford Transformers.
