My solution doesn’t get rid of the desire to buy protection from goodmail.

The problem with goodmail, and many other anti-spam solutions, is they are innovation killers, because they require e-mail sending apps to be money enabled, and worse, financially justifiable. With per-mail charges, you get no hotmail, no gmail, no apps that send mail on your behalf (including, I will point out, one I am building.) No evite. No social networking sites. Not just because they would need to pay money to send mail for people but because if they want to avoid that they need a way to have money accounts for users. Most innovations would be killed dead really, really fast. You may not realize what a killer having to add money to an app is. Or even permission.

But this is just one of many reasons the idea sucks.

Small costs like a penny would still have plenty of spam. Large costs screw up most of the dynamics of email. We really should be sure we’ve run out of other ideas before being tempted into this one.