Spam's never been a content issue. It is speech - but the sort of speech (or shall we say communication) where the recipient bears most of the costs, and the setup and incremental costs for the sender of spam are trivially low.

e-postage and micropayment schemes of one variety or the other are just not new, and Daum Korea (as big a name among email users in korea as AOL is stateside) has long been using what they call an "e-stamp" scheme, where bulk senders buy online stamps to send email to Daum users, and where Daum users can click on the stamp displayed in email from these bulk senders, to vote on whether or not they actually want / solicited the email .. with some provisions to provide free stamps to nonprofit senders, and to discount / make stamps free to a sender if lots of Daum users said they wanted their email. Sorta kinda like goodmail.

But Daum found it rather difficult to apply that system to senders from outside korea, and to even senders within Korea. AOL is not even trying to extend goodmail to try and charge Aunt Tilly ... they're targeting bulk senders of email as I said.

In other words, this or any other "pay to send email scheme" is NOT going to scale to charge all email. Ever. Read through John Levine's great paper on this - http://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf (and of course his "how bad is goodmail") http://weblog.johnlevine.com/2006/02/14#goodmail

I'll repeat that the goodmail issue - as has been a lot of the recent eff position papers etc on spam - is a tempest in a teapot. And an artificially created, and highly inaccurate tempest at that.