This may be the ultimate solution to spam.

The idea of charging for e-mail has been discussed as a spam solution for years so there is no wonder that no one has thought of it - many have. As noted in the article, however, the micro-payment problem was the problem.

Something extremely similar to this was discussed on Moira Breen's blog a few months back (March, I think). In that case, however, it was discussed as a way to pay bloggers by in effect paying them to read and respond to e-mail (I have little doubt that you'd respond much more promptly to an e-mail with a $10 stamp than one with no stamp. It would of course be easy to rank your e-mail by the stamp value).

This leads to the question - can the stamps be tagged for a specific person? If not, then what prevents some middle man from skimming off all of the stamps? If so then how is the recipient identified?

DEC had a very effective micro-payment system called Millicent that would been perfect for an e-mail toll gate. Jerry Pournelle and I drove up to a seminar they gave in Palo Alto. I still have the polo shirt, notebook, giant penny key fob and other goodies they handed out. Which is about all anyone has to show for that effort.

We thought the toll gate was the application that would win over even the 'information wants to be free' zealots but the DEC folks were completely against it for reason they could never explain.

Millicent was terrific in that it handle evenminute fractions of a cent, ergo the name. It would take less than a penny per message to break the spam industry.