DIGITAL DOMAIN
By RANDALL STROSS Published: February 13, 2005
COMPARE our e-mail system today with the British General Post Office in 1839, and ours wins. Compare it with the British postal system in
1840, however, and ours loses.
In that year, the British introduced the Penny Black, the first postage stamp. It simplified postage -- yes, to a penny -- and shifted the cost from the recipient to the sender, who had to prepay. We look back with wonder that it could have ever been otherwise. Recipient pays? Why should the person who had not initiated the transaction be forced to pay for a message with unseen contents? What a perverse system.
Today, however, we meekly assume that the recipient of e-mail must bear the costs. It is nominally free, of course, but it arrives in polluted form. Cleaning out the stuff once it reaches our in-box, or our Internet service provider's, is irritating beyond words, costly even without per-message postage. This muck -- Hotmail alone catches about 3.2 billion unsolicited messages a day -- is a bane of modern life.
Even the best filters address the problem too late, after this sludge has been discharged without cost to the polluter. In my case, desperation has driven me to send all my messages sequentially through three separate filter systems. Then I must remember to check the three junk folders to see what failed to get through that should have. Recipient pays.