Stamp It Out A new proposal aims to bring spam under control

Spam costs you and your employees productivity and computingpower. And that means it costs you money. Now money is at thecenter of a new anti-spam movement. "E-postage" is theconcept of attaching virtual stamps to e-mail to reduce unwantedbulk e-mail. The idea is to create a monetary barrier similar towhat keeps our physical mailboxes from overflowing.

We can hear the collective groan, "Don't make us payfor e-mail!" That attitude, prevalent among growing businessesthat rely on legitimate bulk e-mail, is one block to e-postageproposals. "The only people who seem to be enthusiastic aboute-postage are the people who plan to sell you stamps," saysJohn R. Levine, co-author of Fighting Spam for Dummies and co-chairof the Anti-Spam Research Group (http://asrg.sp.am).

Technical and implementation difficulties combined with anaversion to paying extra for e-mail seem to spell doom fore-postage. Still, companies like Goodmail Systems (www.goodmail.com) arepressing forward with their e-postage offerings, and even Microsofthas been moving in that direction.