This idea kind of plays on Bill Gates’ idea of charging 1 cent per email sent which is actually a pretty good idea. Although email should really be free…which is where my idea comes in. Why not attach a paypall account (or some other kind of online account) to an email address. This paypal account has as much money as you want to put in it. I would probably put a couple dollars in there. When I send an email it would subtract 1 cent (or more) from the account. When the person I sent the email to got the email, he/she would click accept and then the money would be refunded. All the proceeds could go to charity or something or to me for thinking up this idea. There are some down sides. For example, someone who hated me could just not refund my money. If it happened every once and a while it wouldn’t be that bad. Also, what about mailing lists? I get a couple mailing lists and don’t really check them until I need something some info from them. These would never be refunded. I guess companies like Yahoo would be exempt from paying. Some email clients like Mail.app could automatically give money back to the items it thought were not spam and ignore the rest. It has been shown that some junk filters are actually better than humans at spotting spam. So what do you think of this idea?
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