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By Declan McCullagh, 20 February 2003 16:39

NEWS An Australian entrepreneur has made what could prove to be a major breakthrough in the fight against spam - an email 'congestion charge', which will effectively mean spammers wanting to get messages into your inbox will have to pay for the privilege. Of course, few, if any, will bother to do so, but the net effect will be a massive reduction in the amount of spam reaching users' inboxes. The concept has been discussed in technology circles for the best part of a decade, but Sydney resident Bernard Palmer, 59, has decided to try to turn the concept into a business. Palmer said: "Spammers aren't going to be sending many spams to you if you charge them 50 cents. A [four million email] spam would cost them $2m." Palmer's service is called CashRamSpam.com. After people pay $36 with a credit card to sign up for a CashRamSpam account, users may set their contact fee at whatever cost they deem appropriate. At least in its current form, CashRamSpam is more of a 'proof of concept' than it is a robust antispam solution. Anyone who wishes to contact a CashRamSpam customer must purchase an account themselves first, there is no provision to permit friends or colleagues, and the system does not permit legitimate mailing lists to which users voluntarily subscribe to bypass the payment process. CashRamSpam keeps 10 per cent of a user's contact fee as its payment. When someone tries to contact a CashRamSpam customer, a message is automatically returned saying: "We regret your message cannot be delivered using ordinary email because the receiver has a CashRamSpam account... If you want to succeed in reaching this receiver please register at www.cashramspam.com and resend the message from there." Brad Templeton, who wrote an influential essay around 1995 about charging for email, says those shortcomings could doom the concept. Templeton, who is also chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says he no longer supports the idea of charging for email. "I think it's a bad idea in principle," Templeton said. "We're putting an artificial cost on communication, free expression. It would have a chilling effect on speech if it were widespread. It shouldn't cost you money to talk to someone for no other reason than to cost your money. You have a right to demand that people pay your money for your attention, but it's overall not a good idea." Palmer says he's not worried by the criticism. "If you wanted to email them one time, it's a lot of money," Palmer said about the cost to set up an account. "But if you're going to use the program for your main email system, it's relatively cheap to start off with. You're getting the benefit of no spam. How many systems can say that? Can any system out there besides mine say they have no spam?"