THE EMAIL TAX (was Re: Pay to send email...)

[lug at the-leveys.us (Don Levey)]

discuss-bounces at blu.org wrote:
> Robert La Ferla wrote:
>> There was an article on this on the BBC today and I think we will see
>> more and more articles on this as corporations are salivating over
>> the prospects of profiting from every e-mail you send.  Corporations
>> will start out charging us to send e-mail then at some point the
>> government will step in and extract a tax from it.  Be prepared to
>> pay through the nose for e-mail.  I can see it now.  If you want to
>> send an e-mail to India, it will cost you only $0.05/KB but we have
>> great rates on e-mail to Mexico for only $0.01/KB.
>>
>> BBC Article on Paying for E-Mail
>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4684942.stm
>
> I think if that trend really started to take hold, other
> internet-based communication methods would become more prevalent, as
> well as webmail systems, where emails are not actually delivered over
> SMTP.
>

This is not what many people are making it out to be.

You and I will NOT need to pay in order to send our email to AOL or Yahoo.
Many of those protesting, those who are opposing this move and spreading
that FUD, are what many anti-spammers call "chickenboners":

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/chickenboner.html
chickenboner: n.
[spamfighters] Derogatory term for a spammer. The image that goes with it is
of an overweight redneck with bad teeth living in a trailer, hunched in
semi-darkness over his computer and surrounded by rotting chicken bones in
half-eaten KFC buckets and empty beer cans. See
http://www.spamfaq.net/terminology.shtml#chickenboner for discussion.

This measure will separate them from the larger commercial spammers and
email marketers.  Those larger outfits will be happy to pay a fraction of a
cent to get their mail through.  Why?  Because all this is doing is
providing a guaranteed pass THROUGH the ISP's anti-spam filters.  The
smaller outfits, chickenboners, and those who don't want to pay may still be
able to get their mail through, but they'll be taking the harder route
through the filters.

We'll be going through their filters also.  But unless we're hawking organ
enhancements, we might be filtered - into the user's junk mail filter, not
the bit-bucket.  The recipient would still have the ability to white-list us
as individuals.  This isn't really an anti-spam measure, and not an email
"tax" - it's a pro-business email measure.

 -Don