Bill Gates (and Others) Must Burn in Hell For This

Gates Backs E-Mail Stamp in War on Spam

That's not some technological "stamp" that proves the identity of the owner, but an honest-to-goodness STAMP that people would be charged for in order to send e-mail.

I don't care if I have to put up with spam filters in order to keep my e-mail free. For pity's sake, I'm already paying a monthly fee to my ISP for the privilege of using an e-mail account. To my mind, that's more than enough to cover the small volume of e-mail that I send each day without me getting charged a penny or more for each message, especially when cable Internet service can cost as much as $50 a month.

I don't believe for a second that stamps would remain limited to bulk mailers. Once ISPs start receiving this nice new revenue stream (because you aren't getting paid with stamps for allowing messages into your own inbox), they'll extend it to everyone else, maybe on a sliding scale at first, but eventually we'll all be paying something equivalent to what we pay at the post office.

A penny won't be enough for long, either. Sure, a penny might discourage those random spammers who expect a 10 in a million response rate, but how many spammers out there are making enough profit from 10 people to justify the time invested? Stamps will just encourage more aggressive marketing and higher prices as e-mail marketers become more like other direct marketers. Doesn't anyone notice that the cost of sending snail mail and making phone calls hasn't stopped junk mailers and telemarketers?

E-mail stamps are just a way for people (like Gates -- Microsoft is an ISP, remember?) to profit off of the existing free communication network. Spam won't stop, but ISPs and tech companies will no longer care about trying to find a more secure standard for e-mail because the dough will be rolling in. The drive for profits is why we have so few standards on the Internet to begin with (see: instant messaging, Web sites that only work in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows).

By the way, IE fans, did you know that there will be no new version of IE for Windows (forget IE for Mac; Microsoft killed it a few months ago so it'll never see an update) until Microsoft releases Longhorn, its mythical update to Windows? We've been hearing about Longhorn basically since XP came out, and it's release date has been pushed back again and again, until now it's vaguely expected sometime between 2005 and 2007. Long time, no?