"Cost shifting" used to be quite the buzzword in discussions of
the rise of spam,
and how the receiver of e-mail pays to receive it, rather than the
sender, as with
postal mail.
The plan at pay2send.com is to shift the cost of sending e-mail
back to the senders
of the e-mail by establishing the pay2send forwarding service.
The pay2send forwarding service is a e-mail forwarder (like bigfoot.com)
that
discriminates in what it will forward, based on per-recipient rules.
You set the price for which you will receive an e-mail from someone
you have
not approved in advance.
You also receive a daily (or on-demand) list of the unforwarded e-mails
waiting
to be delivered to you when the sender pays, so that you may select
ones you you wish
to see, or delete ones you know you don't want to see.
The pay2send service skims an operation fee, tentatively five dollars
a month, if it is
there, from your account's incoming payments. The remaining amount
is delivered to
you via tha tipjar.com transaction service.
Unlike services which claim to pay you to receive junk mail but require
immense
effort to collect and then you find you have collected a discount coupon
for something
you didn't want anyway, pay2send blocks e-mails from senders who have
not paid
in advance, and can even be configured to not even show you the senders
and subject
lines of mail from registered bulk e-mailers who have not paid to send
to you.
By allowing you, the recipient, to set your own unapproved delivery
fee, pay2send.com
can function as a post office that splits with you the cost of the
bulk rate stamp or as a
client screening service for the highly paid professional who does
not wish to bother
with alleged potential clients who cannot ante up to buy an interview.
Your pay2send address can be safely used in "public" situations, since
anyone who
"harvests" it will have to pay your unapproved delivery fee to have
you read their
bulk e-mails. In fact, we encourage you to sign up for bulk e-mail
services with
your pay2send address, to help publicize the service and get the senders
used to the
idea that from
now on, they have to pay.
You set the price you are willing to automatically pay to send e-mail
to someone
who has not approved you in advance.
You receive a daily (or on-demand) list of the unforwarded e-mails from
you waiting
to be delivered when you pay, so that you may select ones you you wish
to pay more than
your registered maximum delivery fee to have delivered, or delete ones
you know you
don't want to send, to free space in your limited size outbound pay2send
mail queue.
Targeted lists of recipients willing to be paid to receive promotional
mails from you
can be made available, and you can be assured that you will never lose
an ISP account
to spamming complaints if you restrict your mass e-mailing activities
to addresses
at the pay2send.com e-mail domain.
With the tipjar.com system having a money injection from the postage
being paid by
the senders of bulk e-mail, and administrative tieing of tipjar nicknames
and a
set of dotGNU-standard compliant central identity servers with pay2send
e-mail aliases,
all stakeholders, including the program participants, will be able
to just sit and grin
while the
money will roll right in.
I expect that within six months of the publication of this web page,
services such as the
one described here will be offered by Yahoo, Amazon, Paypal, AOL and
Microsoft if we
succeed in setting up pay2send or not. But I'm a pessimist.