I have always been a proponent of an expense based solution, whereby it should cost 10 cents to send an email by making every message a legal account-to-account transaction, with the recipient able to waive the fee upon reading.
An interesting idea, but have you thought it through? What would be the payment mechanism? Would would collect the money, and what would it be used for? More importantly, how long would it be before it was simply bypassed?
No, I haven't thought it through. I envision the payment mechanism as the email itself - requiring a fundamental rework of SMTP for example, and essentially an electronic money transfer to the recipient's account (ISP links email address to specified account at user's bank of choice) which must be validated prior to acceptance of the message. I don't know what would be technically involved - I'm not a computer guy, but given that 90% of all email is spam, the overhead to validate and process transactions could be nine times that of actual message traffic before no longer being beneficial. Money goes directly to the message recipient - no third parties involved, and email clients could be configured to simply waive these transactions altogether if a message is purposefully read by the recipient, versus getting caught by a spam filter, for example.
Orange Soda? This is rocket science, they use Tang.
Don't we all...
"I don't believe in sweeping social change being manifested by one person, unless he has an atomic weapon." -- Howard Chaykin