What are your guys opinions about paying for e-mail?

Check this out

 

Ouch!For private E-mail maybe,but not for a forum like this.It would kill it.IMO.

 

We already pay for E-mail. unless you're using some "free" INTERNET access service you're paying for the privilege of logging on and communicating electronically. Paying on a piecemeal basis simply amounts to another tax and is there anyone out there that wants another tax???

 

jskufan is absolutely right. We pay for our internet provider which includes e-mail as a feature. We also put up with countless pop-up ads so that advertisers can subsidize internet costs. I love my internet but I already pay a considerable fee for the right to use e-mail and to surf the web.

USPS stamp are designed to offset the cost of physically delivering mail from one location to another. Our internet service is essentially the same thing - a fee to allow us to access a network linking one place to another electronically. To place a fee on e-mail would be excessive unless the internet will be provided at no cost and we pay only for the time we use it. Isn't that the way the internet started out? People bought a set numbet of hours of use like a cell phone? I say leave the internet as is - "if it ain't broke don't tinker with it!"

 

I agree too that we should not have to pay for email. We are already paying for the internet that has email as a feature of that service. If they wanted to do something like that, why don't they just make free email services like Yahoo or Hotmail pay services and do not include free email with your internet service.

One thing I read in the article was that this idea of charging postage on email was to eliminate spam and junk mail. Another solution to the problem is to put a limit on the number of emails that a person can send. Or they could have better email filters in email programs that would filter out unwanted mail. I know they already do now, but the ones I use still let a bunch of unwanted email through.

To many of us, we are already paying too much for the internet now and having additional charges could financially hurt us. Bill Gates has so much money that he would not even notice the additional charges. But for many of us, we struggle now and additional charges would only hurt the internet. In the long run, I think that adding a charge to emails would would be bad for everyone involved.

 

This is nothing more than a attempt to tax us even more, but I see it as a even bigger threat to buisnesses.

I dont know about you guys, but at my job, I live by emails. The average American population doesent even come close to the volume of emails that corporations generate.

On a average day I recieve in the neighbor hood of 100 emails...while at work, can you imagine the amout of cost this would equate to for the buisness???

 

....I figured that was why Im paying for internet access. If I had to pay for email as well I would cancel everything....just on principle. I can live w/o internet, just as I do live w/o cell phones, cable tv and all the other luxuries that the corporations seem to think society cant live w/o.
I originally got a computer to play games on, but, now I find I need to constantly upgrade the system to keep pace with the game technology....So I stopped playing games or at least buying new ones.... More money in my pocket.

 

Have you ever seen a liberal that didn't like a tax on anything.

 

We already do....Don't you pay a monthly fee to your ISP???

Even if you go to a public library and use hot mail it is still paid for through advertising they sell...

 

Hmmm...Let's see. I currently pay $0.00 per email. I guess the Government could double that, but no more than that. I can't raise my paycheck every time I want to spend money. The Government needs to learn to operate as we do, within a budget.
(gets off soapbox)

 

We already paid for internet connection and a cd burner, too, but it's illegal to burn cds of music that you downloaded. Which is why I was completely against Napster charging for their service, it's a bunch of bs. There will be a tax on email eventually, but I don't see it anytime soon. It would kill spam, though!

 

The internet thrives because the govt has not been able to get their hands on it and regulate it into stagnation (or oblivion...yet)

The internet is seen as a great threat to those that operate behind the scenes and above the law. That is because it provides a vehicle for the vast distribution of information that is not in control of the established media (and it's puppet masters) and is accessible to us 'working stiffs'.

Once email gets in their hands, it'll be "priced" out of the reach of most folks. That'll leave us relying on "them" for information that should be available to anyone in a 'free society'. If you want to know the deleterious effects a closed on controlled society has on it's people, the former Soviet Union is a good recent example.

Freedom isn't free if you rely on government to give it to you.

Vito

 

Actually, the logic presented by many here is backwards.

Postal mail is paid for by the sender. If someone wants to send junk mail to your street mail box, they must pay postage.

Internet mail is the opposite. You, the receiver, pay the costs of receiving mail. You pay to receive spam, the spammers pay nothing. You pay to get bombarded with junk mail, the spammers pay nothing. More than 60% of email sent is spam and nearly 1/3rd of the average Internet bill each month that you pay is to cover the bandwidth and resource costs of spam.

By making the sender pay most spammers will be out of business because they'll no longer have a free ride. Even paying for your outbound email, your monthly Internet service bill will go down. FTE's costs will go down as well. Even though we block most spam email when it gets to our server, we still have to pay for the bandwidth. We block far more mail then we ever send out, it would cost us less to pay for outbound mail than paying for bandwidth eaten up by spam.

Put it this way.... you pay for monthly minutes for a cell phone, right? How would you feel if 60% or more of the calls you received on it were telemarketers and they ate up all your minutes, costing you more per month? That's exactly what's been happening for years with the current email system. "Sender paying" has been proposed for nearly a decade, long before Bill Gates brought it up and the two reasons its not implemented are: a) it would break existing mail systems, b) standardising a universal payment system is a nightmare.

Frankly the reaction I see here is at the very least misinformed and at most, paranoid. This has nothing do with freedom, control or censorship (Unix and Windows system admins have been able to read and filter their user's emails for years but they don't because its an issue of ethics and trust). You pay for your long distance calls, the receiver doesn't and you're still free to say what you want on that call, aren't you? That's exactly what's being worked on.

Just my humble opinion.... as I'm faced with ever larger bandwidth bills.

 

I just wish that someone would make a junkmail filter that would catch 98 percent of it. I would pay 100 dollars for software that caught all the spam and junkmail.

 

i just had this sent to me, is there any truth to this? its kinda long.but it has a ring of truth to it. don't put anything past our goverment.



Guess the warnings were true. Federal Bill 602P charges 5-cents per E-mail sent. It figures! No more free E-mail! We knew this was coming!! Bill 602P will permit the Federal Government to charge a 5-cent charge on every delivered E-mail.

Please read the following carefully if you intend to stay online and
continue using E-mail. The last few months have revealed an alarming trend in the Government of the United States attempting to quietly push through legislation that will affect our use of the Internet.

Under proposed legislation, the US Postal Service will be attempting to bill E-mail users out of "alternative postage fees."

Bill 602P will permit the Federal Government to charge a 5-cent
surcharge on every e-mail delivered, by billing Internet Service
Providers at source. The consumer would then be billed in turn by the ISP. Washington, DC lawyer Richard Stepp is working without pay to prevent this legislation from becoming law.

The US Postal Service is claiming lost revenue, due to the proliferation of E-mail, is costing nearly $230,000,000 in revenue per year. You may have noticed their recent ad campaign: "There is nothing like a letter."

Since the average person received about 10 pieces of E-mail per day in 1998, the cost of the typical individual would be an additional 50 cents a day -- or over $180 per year -- above and beyond their regular Internet costs.

Note that this would be money paid directly to the US Postal Service for a service they do not even provide.

The whole point of the Internet is democracy and non-interference. You are already paying an exorbitant price for snail mail because of bureaucratic inefficiency. It currently takes up to 6 days for a letter to be delivered from coast to coast. If the US Postal Service is allowed to tinker with E-mail, it will mark the end of the "free" Internet in the United States.

Congressional representative, Tony Schnell (R) has even suggested a "$20-$40 per month surcharge on all Internet
service" above and beyond the governments proposed E-mail charges. Note that most of the major newspapers have ignored the story the only exception being the Washingtonian which called the idea of E-mail surcharge "a useful concept who's time has come" (March 6th, 1999 Editorial). Do not sit by and watch your freedom erode away!

Send this E-mail to EVERYONE on your list, and tell all your friends and relatives to write their congressional representative and say "NO" to Bill 602P.

It will only take a few moments of your time and could very well be instrumental in killing a bill we do not want.