http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/05/spam.charge.ap/index.html
If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes
would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes
entries, and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk
e-mail: It's essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman
Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying
"stamps" for e-mail.
...
Though postage proposals have been in limited discussion for years --
a team at Microsoft Research has been at it since 2001 -- Gates gave
the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland. Details came last week as part of Microsoft's anti-spam
strategy. Instead of paying a penny, the sender would "buy" postage by
devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math
puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender's good
faith.
...
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