Craig Newmark has a proposal to counter Goodmail. craigblog: a big advance for spam and phishing fighting?

The problem with Craig's proposal - that authorized, digitally signed email passes through spam filters - is that it doesn't create a sender 'cost'. This therefore cannot be a true cure against spam, since spam is a product of almost zero cost for the sender.

As we are seeing, costs are always introduced in any marketplace, and with email being free to send, the self-emergent cost, in dealing with spam, is passed to the receiver.

The postal service did not grow exponentially until it switched from a receiver to a sender pays model, and US cellphone use lags other developed nations because both call sender and recipients pay. If neither sender and recipient pay, as with email it seems that the recipient ends up paying. So the Goodmail solution plays into the way things are in any system.

If people don't like the idea that the big email hubs like AOL will make money from this (since they are making money for not doing much) then perhaps the solution is that this sender tax should only be levied against people who send much more email than they receive, thus cancelling out any charge to most individuals.

The money raised could be donated to a suitable group. My choice would be a range of charities, including the EFF.