@EndlessMason
Consider also that the storage of HTML email takes up many times as much disk space as it needs to. In the case of not-for-profit orgs sending out thousands of copies of an email, that's causing a web page to be stored that many times (at least until the receivers delete it), instead of just once, on the web. I haven't even mentioned the increased security risks (makes phishing easier etc etc).
email blue for just $8/month, right?
Who would you even pay? Email doesn't belong to someone. How would each relay verify the payment? Does each relay get a cut? And why would I, the consumer of email, trust someone with money more than someone without money?
@EndlessMason
> why would I, the consumer of email, trust someone with money more than someone without money?
Good question. Charging for email to defang spam has been considered a few times and abandoned as unfeasible.
@strypey We as yet have no micropayment architecture wired into the net. Maybe building one is too much effort, but it would buy a lot (pun intended).
@billstclair I had read about that micropayments idea. The cellphone companies basically had it - per-second or per-minute calling plans or per-SMS charging.
And people did instead go more for higher-priced unlimited calling plans or bundled minutes or bundled SMS'es. E-mail hasn't had that tried, even as a thought exercise, has it? A free tier with 30 e-mails per month + paid tiers. It has kept SMS spam humanly manageable.
@billstclair @EndlessMason @strypey e-mail storage might be quite efficient nowadays - everybody is on GMail and Google surely must be de-duplicating by design. So, the main inefficiency has to be in the transmission to the client ... which happens on Google's web page. GMail has solved the HTML e-mail overhead problem 😎