Tim Bray wants to move to an "internet stamp" system in order to eliminate spam. It's a nice idea, but it will never work. Why? Well, what do you do if a bunch of domains decide to offer internet stamps for free? Just knock them off the net? Yeah, that'll go over well. There's another problem too - it requires a long grace period followed by a cutoff date - after which older clients will just stop working. Yes, I can sure see that happening too. How do you plan to manage an enforced upgrade across every platform on the net?

There's an even simpler problem. Let's say the cost is a penny a transmission, as Tim posits. This assumes a robust micropayment architecture (which doesn't exist). It also assumes that at that cost, spamming is prohibitive.

Hmm - that's $10,000 to send a million messages. Based on the kinds of revenues that spammers are supposedly rolling in, I suspect that this will be less of a disincentive than Tim thinks. People pay astounding amounts of money to put 30 second spots on the superbowl - spending $100,000 to put 10 million spam messages out just doesn't sound that wild to me. Not to mention the enormous pressure on governments to make unsolicited mail legal once there's tax revenue to be gleaned from it. No doubt you've seen the huge efforts governments take to stop unsolicited snail mail?

Thanks, but no thanks. Take that solution and just bury it.