Paying for e-mail becomes more realistic
Bill Gates’ idea about charging certain amount for each piece of e-mail you receive (a penny for strangers, zero for people you know and white-list, five bucks for those who forward chain letters) is getting some practical implementation. An Israeli company called Goodmail is currently developing a technology to do just that and even managed to pitch it to folks at Yahoo! Haaretz goes as far as claiming that “the stamp will be identifiable by ISPs worldwide”, without going into too much detail there.
Meanwhile, the story of Google preparing a free e-mail offering that I submitted to Slashdot got posted and there’s some guy, who knows a guy who knows a guy who works at Google, says that Google’s service will pitch you context-based advertising (not too cool), but will offer 1 GB of e-mail space for such inconvenience (fucking unbelievable). Of course, reliability of such sources is questionable, but Google is in good position to do just that, with terabyte of storage not costing too much, and with possibility to scrape each and every Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail user out there just before the IPO.