Make 'em pay.

SPAM email; EMAIL; INTERNET marketing; INTERNET service providers; WORLD Wide Web; EMAIL systems; GOODMAIL Systems Inc.; INTERNET industry

The short history of society's fight against spam--usually defined as unwanted commercial e-mail--may be about to pass into a significant phase. Politicians joined in, eager to get their names on to new legislation--in the United States, for instance, 36 states and Congress have passed laws of some sort against spam. Now, in another phase, the economists are taking over. An obvious solution is to charge for e-mail, or at least for the sort that spammers send. This idea has even been endorsed by Bill Gates of Microsoft Corporation. Goodmail Systems, a start-up, hopes to launch such a solution. Amazon, keen that its automatic order-confirmations not be filtered out as spam by mistake, would buy a million e-mail "stamps" for $ 0.01 each from Goodmail, which would share the $10,000 with participating internet service providers (ISPs). Goodmail fixes the stamps to Amazon's e-mails as encrypted e-mail headers, and sends the decryption key to the ISPs.