Sorry, I disagree. Sending email has almost never been free.
Most of us pay for internet access. Email has been a non-itemized portion of this, but we still have to pay.
Part of the cost that we are paying are the amortized costs of spam, which costs each ISP a fair amount of resources. These costs are passed along to consumers, of course.
I can't imagine individual users boycotting ISPs that used a service like this, as it would result in reduced Internet costs and reduced spam. If you are not sending unsolicited emails, you'd never have to pay, and even if you are sending small amounts of unsolicited emails, the new costs would be more than offset by the savings passed on by the ISP.
The only people who'd be against it would be the spammers-- and once a critical mass of ISPs implemented, they wouldn't really have much of a choice: they'd either have to pay to send, or lose access to a large percentage of mailboxes.
Comments
Sorry, I disagree. Sending email has almost never been free.
Most of us pay for internet access. Email has been a non-itemized portion of this, but we still have to pay.
Part of the cost that we are paying are the amortized costs of spam, which costs each ISP a fair amount of resources. These costs are passed along to consumers, of course.
I can't imagine individual users boycotting ISPs that used a service like this, as it would result in reduced Internet costs and reduced spam. If you are not sending unsolicited emails, you'd never have to pay, and even if you are sending small amounts of unsolicited emails, the new costs would be more than offset by the savings passed on by the ISP.
The only people who'd be against it would be the spammers-- and once a critical mass of ISPs implemented, they wouldn't really have much of a choice: they'd either have to pay to send, or lose access to a large percentage of mailboxes.