why is it that every few years some yahoo thinks that it’s a good idea to charge for email? I’ll give you a clue. It’s not out of a sense of civic duty and doing the right thing. It’s because they think that they have the corner on the market.

So here’s a clue. SMTP, for all its shortcomings, is an open standard. That means that anyone can write mail clients and mail servers. That means that, whatever pay service you may set up, there will always be free email delivery over the Intenet.

If your model is wonderful enough, sure, you’ll get customers and make a few bucks. Are you going to reject email coming in from the open internet? That could have some rather serious repurcussions to your business customers, dontcha think?

And who gets the penny per message? Surely not the recipient, which would make sense given the claim that this is for the customer.

No, whatever Mr Gates may say (and says every few years, ever since he discovered the Internet) some things have been free from the outset, and without very unpleasant legislation to the contrary, are going to stay free.

Hmm. I wonder if someone can figure out a way to classify unsolicited email as terrorism?