Internet experts say fee could help reduce spam

HACKENSACK, N.J. — If sheer volume counts for anything, spam is now the king of the unsolicited sales pitch. Chances are you receive far more commercial e-mail than paper junk mail or ill-timed phone calls from telemarketers.

And there's a good reason for that: E-mail is practically free.

For the price of a PC and an Internet connection, a marketer can send out millions of come-ons for Viagra, mortgage refinancing and easy-to-obtain college degrees.

But what if each e-mail message cost something to send — perhaps a penny or less? Might that stop spammers from hitting the "send" button so indiscriminately?

The idea has been bandied about for years, but it gained prominence in January when Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., predicted that the most likely cure for spam would be "monetary."

Gates, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, envisioned something like this: People would set a fee for accepting e-mail from strangers. If the e-mail turned out to be welcome — say, from a long-lost relative — the recipient could waive the fee.

Neither Gates nor Microsoft has much more to say about the idea than that. But John Thompson, the chief executive officer of Symantec — one of the leading anti-virus software makers — has endorsed some variant of that idea. Regular junk mailers, he told PC magazine this month, are held in check by the need to pay for postage.

"If you take the same concept and apply it to the digital world, what you get is a charge system for bulk mail over the Internet," he said.

A charge as low as a quarter of a penny "would crush spammers' business model," according to a December report by Forrester Research, a technology consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.

"Something needs to hit the pocketbooks of the mailers in order to ultimately solve the problem for the long term," said Elana Anderson, a senior analyst at Forrester.

For now, the tech industry is, appropriately, focusing on a technological solution to spam because so much of the problem is generated by shady marketers — if they're selling anything at all — who hide behind fake e-mail addresses, routing their messages through unsecure holes in the Internet.

Microsoft, for example, is developing what it calls a "Caller ID for E-mail" that will block any message if the sender's identity can't be verified.