OT: Charge / tax per e-mail?

[AMF]

Hoax!

Go here:

http://www.urbanlegends.com/ulz/emailtax.html

[Gryphin]

BTW:
www.urbanlegends.com
is a great site anytime you get / see something where your first reation is:
"Oh my god!!!!"
Always check their first.

[Suicide Junkie]

Even if it were real, it would be impossible to enforce without revealing all that tech the guys with the tinfoil hats fear.

[Krsqk]

Another clue would be that House bills start with HR and Senate bills start with S. I've never seen a "602P" anywhere.

*shakes head, wondering what they teach in high school civics these days*

[edit]That should be HB, not HR.

*shakes head, wondering how early Alzheimer's can start*

[ February 20, 2004, 22:25: Message edited by: Krsqk ]

[Cipher7071]

Sooooo....it was easy after all. I marked that urban legends website for future reference.

[Sabin]

If an actual bill was to release, the price should be somewhat more reasonable, if it can prevent spam from continuing it's rather irritating progression.

I just used a computer calculator to see what the costs were if such a bill was passed to charge $0.01 for 1 email that is sent by one person for 365 days:

$0.01 x 365(once per day): $3.65
$3.65 x 100,000(emails, bulk.): $365,000.

That is quite a hefty charge if a person sent email in bulk, let's say they tried to send 1,000 emails for 365 days, at the same price:

$0.01 x 1,000: $10
$10 x 365(10 times per day): $3,650
$3,650 x 100,000(emails per day): $3.65e+008

Mind you, my calculation skills are rather horrible, so these may be inaccurate.

However, if they are accurate, then a 1-cent charge per email can reduce the amount of emails made by those who create spam, due to the enormous bill they would acquire.

However, how would this affect real companies? I believe if they send a large amount of e-mail, perhaps they can acquire licenses from the government to reduce/eliminate the costs.
(Though that would make them a major target for spam creators.)

However, the money the government makes can be placed into policing spammer activities, which can lead to a very profitable cycle.(Or disasterous, if the amount of spam creation gets too low, which may prompt the abandoning of the enforcement agencies, therefore leading to more spam being created.)

[narf poit chez BOOM]

how about 0.00001^2 per email? would cut down spammers, but not really affect anybody else.