Talk:Semipostal stamp for email

collective intelligence

Amusingly (pretended) lack of collective intelligence and foresight leads to a beneficial effect here: Acting collectively intelligent people would easily avoid paying postage but under the pretense of not being able to avoid paying postage senders might choose to get back at the recipients by also demanding postage. Collectively intelligent people would choose to pretent to lack collective intelligence and foresight in order to gain the beneficial effects: One beneficial effect here, whose causation could be seen as a moral obligation, is that people who were actually not particularly interested in donating money for charitable purposes might sneakily be corrupted to take an interest because they would suddenly have a budget for it that had no other conceivable use. People might flip through a catalog like goodgifts.org simply because there was a budget to be spend and they liked shopping or due to force of habit. --Fasten 05:09, 31 May 2007 (EDT)

affiliate program

One could also use an affiliate program or similar service (e.g. opodo, pegasus) and allow the customers to spend the earned commission in a "shop" like goodgifts.org, similar to postage fees. Some affiliate program providers may be touchy if the customer receives any advantage financed by their money but in this case the customer wouldn't receive anything that was of any value to him or her. --Fasten 04:08, 2 June 2007 (EDT)

problems

digital divide

A postage fee for email would add another aspect to the digital divide: A distinction between people able to pay postage and people unable to pay postage. The problem could be addressed by automatically recommended standard fees dependent on the originator's country, including zero-fee recommendations for the least developed countries.

provider policies

To verify the policies of postage providers a framework like esp may be useful: A recipient could be enabled to demand certain policies from providers in order for them to qualify as admissible postage providers. The amendatory protocol or SMTP extension could allow the sender to negotiate admissible postage providers before sending an email. While this would increase the above problem (the digital divide) it would probably lead to widespread adoption of highest standards to avoid any incompatibilities. To improve the value of high standards as motivation instead of an instant incompatibility new policies could be adopted by recipients with transition periods during which postage providers would be alerted to missing policies but would be accepted as postage providers. Postage providers could be generally expected to be non-profit organizations (e.g. following the goodgifts.org example). --Fasten 04:50, 5 June 2007 (EDT)

the chicken or the egg

Adoption would obviously be hampered by lack of adoption all-around. During a transition period people could be invited to put up banners announcing their participation after a deadline and the software could be run in a mode that demanded postage in advance but tolerated lack of postage with an automatic reply that alerted the sender of the deadline. --Fasten 05:23, 6 June 2007 (EDT)