Paying for email sent

9th February 2006

You might have heard on the news that AOL and MSN are considering charging businesses for each email they send. Well that’s simply not true, and Here’s the full details of what’s going to be happenning…

Basically it says that they may soon be charging senders for DELIVERY to their addresses. sort of like an e-stamp, to insure the mail gets past their spam filters.

That’s fine - however, there’s quite an uproar over the misconception that we’ll be charged to send email, and the reaction seems to be very negative, which surprises me. Personally, I would LOVE to see a pay to send model, perhaps even as a tax. (Yes, I said that)

What would be the ramifications to you if your ISP started charging you “per email sent” ? Would you go broke?

For my own business purposes, I’d say I send about 40 emails a day. Multiply that by 30 days (yes, I work 7 days a week) and that’s about 1200 emails a month.

The figure I’ve heard bantered about is everywhare from 1 cent to 1/100th of a cent per email, which would barely affect me. Even at a full penny per email, it would only be $12 a month.

Sure there’s whining that legitimate email marketers will be impacted, but still only minimally. They’ve been gettign a free ride long enough.

If the cost of a direct mail piece is 39 cents now, but an email cost a penny, there’s still a huge advantage to using email. To mail 2000 emails would only be $20. To mail 20,000 pieces would cost $200.

Think of the effect this would have on spammers, who send tens of millions of emails a day or more. They send all the mail they want, because it’s completely free. If a tiny mandatory charge were placed on email sent, this could effectively put spammers out of business.

If this was enforcable, I think it would be the perfect way to decrease spam, and increase revenue for much needed wireless broadband internet infrastructure in the United States. The reality though, is that spammers would continue to use offshore unregulated servers, and other computers and servers here that they hijack to send their garbage.

I’m not sure what the final answer is, but I do know that since November 2005, the amount of spam on the internet has tripled, and there are no signs of it slowing down. There’s got to be a way to stop it without putting the burden on us, the innocent emailbox owners.

Until then though, there’s always SpamArrest.