As if...

Industry giants Hotmail and Yahoo! are considering charging for every message sent in an attempt to curb spam clogging the internet.

Yeah, that's it. They're thinking about charging to cut down spam. That's the ticket. Not to get revenue from legitimate users. OH no.

Personally I don't see that much spam originate from hotmail (or admit to, at any rate). How hard can it be to ensure someone doesn't send 3,000 messages from the same hotmail address in a day? Or even that one IP is sending out requests to three-hundred hotmail accounts to send out ten messages each? That's a decent MS hacker in a room for three weeks, tops, and that's tested and ready to go.

Now if they wanted to charge people that send mail that's reported as spam, I'd be all for it. Unf. that's a very hard thing to set up without killing SMTP as we know it. Back to the drawing board.

Anyhow, this sounds like an idea that skipped the impressively savvy MS programmers all together and hit the Profit Maximization Bureau straight out of a manager's mouth.