Sean Johnson - Intentionally - The Education of Sean Johnson

Seth Godin certainly caused a ruckus with his post on stamps.

The premise of electronic stamps is to begin charging people for the privledge of sending email, theory being that spammers would be significantly deterred if they were charged for sending unsolicited mail.

This is a complicated issue. At first glance it seems like a no-brainer - your inbox is cleaner, spam goes down, ISPs make boatloads of cash in the deal as the de facto conduits between parties.

But a number of questions come to my mind. NOTE: When considering the merits of the following questions, keep in mind I’m an idiot.:

1. I’ve yet to use an email tool that knows when an email is coming from a company and when it’s coming from a person. There are numerous implications there - sending personal emails (I can think of dozens of old friends and new friendships that were cultivated are rediscovered via email) to schools sending messages to their students at their email address of preference (hint: not the school’s email account) to notifications from free services like Friendster. These would either become paid transactions (introducing the same friction that keeps me from sending letters to people,) or be relegated to a folder that is collated with all my other junk (forcing me to wade through all the spam anyway.)
2. Spammers have an enormous bag of tricks they can employ to send email - spammers who use an unknowing man or woman’s account to send out messages could potentially be making someone financially responsible for the activity. The need for email fraud litigation or some form of recourse on the part of the victim is now necessary - costs ISPs will now have to take into account.
3. Making a move to RSS would make segmentation and targeting difficult. One of the big tenets of Permission Marketing is for messages be as targeted, personalized and relevant as possible. With email and a simple sign-up form, I have the ability to market to as granular a population as I wish - something the subscriber appreciates and leads to greater revenue opportunities for me. RSS has a ways to go before it can provide the marketer with this power.
4. Are there price controls? AOL, Yahoo! and the like may publish well-known, publicly available information regarding price. But outside of the major mail services, how do I found out what ISP is behind some corporate email address and what their prices are? Wouldn’t I have to essentially ‘opt-in’ to each service? Competitors will certainly be hot on GoodMail’s footsteps, likely with different pricing models, etc. How does regulation of this work?
5. Most importantly - will there be commemerative Elvis birthday e-stamps I can use?

In spite of these drawbacks, I wonder if there’s a happy medium here. The practice of e-postage would undoubtedly decrease spam, but it should be a hoop restricted to businesses. Perhaps tracking IP addresses or domains by volume would help - if a particular domain or IP address/range sends mail that exceeds a certain quota, the ISP begins to charge for it. Just a thought.

A complicated problem, and a viable attempt at solving it. But not without problems of its own.