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I'm about to use the word blockchain, so stuck with me here I'm sorry.

But a web3 built on a the idea that to use a site (post, read) required even trivial thousandths of a cent would be unlikely to harm users but would at least dramatically increase the costs of this sort of thing. And moves the net to rely less on an advertising funding model.

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You're describing proof of work, not blockchain. It's easy to implement it without a blockchain: make MTAs require the hash of the enveloppe of the mail (+ a nonce outside the enveloppe) to start with a certain number of 0 bits.

And make the MTAs return a parseable message when there aren't enough zeros, so the sender MTA can retry with other nonces until there are enough zeros.

And the enveloppe already contains a Message-ID which is to be unique (as it contains the hostname of the sender) and unpredictable, so there shouldn't be issues with replay attacks.

Blockchain would also mostly solve the corrupt ICANN issues being discussed on another thread, but people here don't really want to hear it for some reason.

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