Seth Godin says that to stop spam, the big Internet mail services (Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL) should charge a fraction of a cent for every mail sent into their systems past a per-user quota.

By monetizing email, these big services create the friction that's currently missing from spam. Without friction, it spirals out of control. With friction, on the other hand, mass mailers make intelligent decisions about what's worth sending and what's not.

Oooh, that Haigspeak word, monetizing. Thisis just the most recent screed I've seen that has brought up the idea of charging for e-mail as a way to counter spam.

I'm against it. For one thing, it's impractical technically–how do you chargeback a spammer who hides behind a spoofed e-mail address? No, that would work is to have e-mail address authentication at the SMTP server–if the source address can't be verified as a legitimate source mailbox, then the message gets pitched into the bit bucket. And that would require a reworking of the whole e-mail system.

Secondly, it's draconian. If you can charge back for an e-mail to someone, that means you have to have a record of that e-mail. And that's an invasion of the privacy of every legitimate e-mail user; the potential for abuse is too high, especially if you put that kind of power in the hands of someone like Yahoo, who could go and sell your e-mail habits in a minute with a simple stealth change of its privacy policy and terms of use (like they just did with their own spam systems).