Wired on Friday: Everyone wants spammers to pay. But spammers, being dodgy sorts, are hard to find and force to make amends. In their keenness to make "someone" pay, though, anti-spam solutions often merely shift the costs around, fixing nothing, and even making matters worse, writes Danny O'Brien.

AOL's recently announced experiment to use a third-party, Goodmail, to charge for some incoming e-mail to their service is the latest example of this. AOL's scheme expressly asks "legitimate" mass e-mail marketers - not spammers - to pay a fixed price per email to reach AOL users' inboxes. But AOL customers will pay with with less control over their mail and the spam problem will continue to go unfixed.

The Goodmail business model works like this. Goodmail sells mailers a service whereby every message they send out is franked by Goodmail with a unique "stamp". Goodmail charges per token - about a quarter of a cent.

In return for a cut of the token price, AOL and Yahoo have said that they will override their own spam filters and transfer the mail directly into their customers' inboxes.

At first hearing, this sounds close to one of the ancient solutions for spam: raising the cost of sending e-mail so that spamming millions becomes economically unfeasible. But it only raises the cost for one group of people - "legitimate" marketers who follow Goodmail's rules and are willing to pay them for exclusive access. Spammers still send for no money and other legitimate mass mailers (such as non-profits or enthusiast-run mailing lists) will end up being caught in the fight to give those payers value.

Will it encourage spammers to abandon their ways, and become good netizens, thus reducing spam? Hardly. The hurdles for spammers to leap to join Goodmail's scheme are high - and the costs are even higher. Why should a spammer switch to a per-mail charge rather than continue with the fine economics of sending millions of spams for free against AOL's filters?

That's the other dangerous incentive in the Goodmail system. AOL, Yahoo and Goodmail all make more money, the more their spam filters target "other" legitimate mailers who aren't yet signed up on Goodmail. There's a dangerous cash incentive here for them to cut out non-paying mass mailers. By instigating a private e-mail tax, AOL and Yahoo! have to punish not spammers, but those who seem to be evading their tax. Spammers aren't tax evaders, because they'll never pay anyway. Ordinary netizens who send out "mass" mails and could be "encouraged" to pay are, in other words, non-profits, individuals and communities who run mailing lists.

Of course, Yahoo and AOL can do what they want with their own incoming e-mail service. But it's worth noting what a bad deal this is for their subscribers, too.

Ask yourself this: what are AOL and Yahoo selling that is worth so much money? Their customers' inboxes. AOL will not only be overriding their user's spam filters, but also enabling web-bugs and direct links with this service.

The truth is, there's only one person who can tell what you do and do not want in your inbox - and that's you. No matter what hoops Goodmail asks its customers to jump through, and costs they demand they pay, their e-mails will still be "spam" to you if you don't want to see them.

The real long-term solution to spam is filtering at the user's end. That's the way many modern spam filters are working - you see a mail you don't want and you teach your mail client to ignore similar mails from now on.

"Legitimate" mailers are angry when users throw out mails that they originally agreed to accept, and mark them as spam. But that's a user's right, and no amount of special pleading - or bribing of gatekeepers like AOL - will change that.

It's a fundamental disconnect to believe that AOL knows better what you should see in your inbox than you do.

As it is, I think it's unlikely that Goodmail's service will prove popular. The price difference between being able to send your mail for free and being charged on a per e-mail basis seems so great that few serious mass-mailers will, I imagine, take AOL and Yahoo up on it.

Meanwhile, AOL may think it can sell its users' inboxes, but its users' will, in the slow, determined way of subscription churn, rebel.

Even so, the damage will be done. And even though spam will not abate (or even because it will not abate), we can expect many more schemes like this - and not just because spam will always be with us for as long as we have a free e-mail system, but also because companies like AOL will continue to seek ways to differentiate themselves from the simple task of delivering internet data packets.

Commoditisation and the erosion of value-added ISPs like AOL into simple data conduits looms over all these companies. Spam they can live with. Lower prices and fewer people to charge they cannot.