Pay a Penny for Email & Eliminate Spam?

Would you pay a penny for each email if it eliminated all of the spam in your inbox? Target marketing columnist, Denny Hatch says "Happily!" Here's the business proposal he suggests to the US Postal Service. The Postal Service creates an email service that charges $7.95 per year plus one cent per email that is sent. For guaranteed delivery and return receipt, the fee would be two cents. All sent and received emails would be archived and there would be no ads. In Hatch's words, " If the message is so unimportant that it is not worth 1 cent to the sender for me to see it, he can send it to my Yahoo! inbox."

Hatch says that under this system, spam would disappear and cites a University of California study to back up his assertion: "A team of computer scientists at the University of California showed that it takes 12.5 million spam messages to sell $100 worth of Viagara. Spammers can't afford 1 cent per message." 

I think he is on to something here. Hatch describes his Yahoo inbox as a "vast sewer" in which he hunts through the contents for something that "doesn't smell." I wouldn't describe my G-mail inbox in quite those terms, but I know exactly what he means. I too would happily subscribe to a service that insures the messages I receive are worth reading, and eliminates spam.