Interesting suggestion, e-postage for e-mail. You strike me as someone who 'thinks out of the box' and sees life as a set of infinite possibilities vis-a-vis constrained by the mistakes of the past.

As far as email spam, I receive much more e-mail spam than postal spam and junk mail; but I am much more troubled by junk mail in my postal mail box. Here is why, just Neo-think:

Postal junk mail (junk mail) is bulky, contributes to deforestation (paper based) and global warming, and worst of all (selfish me) sometimes hides the good mail (I've lost important bills tossing out the junk). So, you must 'sort and seek' the pile of junk mail and are forced to handle.

E-mail junk, on the other hand, is more easily managed. I know the domains and people and subjects I find critical, so I filter these into special folders. Default junk (spam) goes to a generic in box. Not withstanding spam and junk filters and blockers, I can easily delete spam with the delete key. So, even when I'm heavily spammed, the time-to-delete is trivial.

Granted, in a rush to delete spam, I've deleted a few good messages, but this is unusual.

So, as much as I have a distaste for spam, I do not find it 'more evil' than things like:

- standing in line
- getting junk mail in my US mail box
- deleting and moving posts in the UNIX forums
- cleaning the house
- fileing papers
- you get the idea

So, it is quite popular to 'call email spam the evil-of-the-world' but, quite frankly, I can name 100s of events than make spam trivial, relatively speaking.

Not that I like spam, but you can make your spam life easier by using temporary mailing addresses and doing things like:

-register with web-sites as neo_web@domain.com or mail@yourdomain.com and by doing these tricks, minimize spam in your inbox.

-do not put your email address in newsgroups and other public forums that are archived and mined

-be careful about your main and favorite email addresses with other public documents.

I'm running out of brain-fodder

Neo