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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

It's not that the solutions are unworkable: The problem is that they are unpalatable.

There are outlier Mail-wonks who maintain pay-to-send wouldn't "work" but they are somewhat in a minority: If you forced senders to pay even tokenistic per-mail sums, the attractiveness of mail would disappear.

People don't want to monetize Mail for complex reasons. The "won't work" aspect in spam pushback has always been debatable.

(there's a well known checkbox list of "your proposed anti-spam mechanism won't work because.. which is a huge antipattern to having a rational debate about it)

The problems are regulatory: who sets the price, who collects the price, whats done with the money, and what it does to the ecology of email internationally. But, it would within some definitions of the term "work"

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Any pay-to-send model destroys mailing lists and the ability for large sites to use email to send notifications (e.g. Amazon package shipments). It's a complete non-starter. I get that you're frustrated with the famous checkbox list but it exists for a reason beyond intellectual laziness - the "won't works" really are won't works.

It's a matter of opinion. It doesn't destroy them, it demands something like patreon. It's a complete non starter because the community does not want to explore it.

I don't expect to convince you any more than I expect to be listened to really: I've held this view since the eighties, earlier list paradigms I used in the 70s met cost, and were policed by list administrators accordingly. This topic has been dominated by a very few loud voices who basically prevent rational discourse.

They pay to send model, at something like 0.1 penny an email does not destory amazon package shipments, but would properly force mailinglists to require payment to be on them.

But more importantly: the list didn't give technical answers, it gave political tradeofs that we never debated. Meanwhile the Gmail team went ahead and did what they did, and now we are stuck with one particular system that people then complain about.

How about user-side whitelists + pay-per-send for anything unsolicited?

It does actually seem rather lazy. "Whitelists suck" is not informative or helpful.

Spammers are the most willing to pay negligible amounts. Way more than regular users. They pay for tools, servers, services, etc. because they have some expected return on email.

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