A Way To Greatly Reduce Spam Emails

This paper describes a way to greatly reduce spam emails. This method could also generate over $100 billion annually in new revenue for the US government. 

Wikipedia’s article on email spam (1) says: “Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, refers to unsolicited messages sent in bulk via email … Since the early 1990s, spam has grown significantly, with estimates suggesting that by 2014, it comprised around 90% of all global email traffic.” 

A different, more recent estimate (2) gives a lower percentage:  “160 billion spam emails are sent every day, with 46% of the 347 billion daily emails sent, considered spam (numbers recorded for 2023). … The majority of people (96.8%) have received spam messages in some form. The U.S. sends the most spam emails, with 8 billion per day on average followed by China with 7.6 billion per day.”

Whether the percentage is 46% or 90%, the number and frequency of spam emails is very large. At a minimum, spam emails are a major daily annoyance and distraction for hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and other nations. In addition, many spam emails are scams or contain viruses. Spam messages can also be received in phone calls, text messages, and via messaging apps. In a survey of people who had received online or telephone messages, over half of those responding to the survey said they had lost money as a result of scams, according to (2): “the most common amount people said they had lost in total because of these scams was $100-$249, however, 2.9% said they had lost over $1,000.”

A SOLUTION

Here is one way to greatly reduce the spam, scam, and evil (e.g. virus-containing) emails that are sent to and received each day by hundreds of millions of people: Make it so that sending a single email would have a nonzero cost, for example 5 cents for each destination email address, which would need to be paid by the sender to the national post office. Without the sender paying such a cost, the email would go into the “bit bucket” and not be delivered. The cost of sending emails would act as a disincentive for sending the unwanted emails.

The payments for sending emails could be used as federal revenue for developing systems to scan emails for spam, scam, and viruses, and for maintenance and improvements to the internet, and for other uses by the post office, or by the US government in general.

To illustrate the amount of federal revenue that might be generated, if 8 billion spam emails are sent per day in the US, then a 5-cent postage charge for each email would generate $400 million in revenue per day for the US government, just from spam email messages. About the same amount of revenue would be generated from non-spam emails, for the US government. Multiplied by 365 days in a year, the annual federal revenue from non-spam emails could be $146 billion for the United States.

Of course, the 5-cent cost per email would act as a disincentive for sending both spam and non-spam emails, and the actual revenue to the US government would be smaller, yet it could still be very substantial. Plausibly, over $100 billion in revenue from non-spam emails could be generated annually for the United States government.

To be clear, although this solution is simple to describe and easy to understand, it would not be easy to implement: There would be a variety of technical, business and government challenges, and probably also new laws to create and implement.[i] Yet we appear to have reached a point where something like this may be needed.

CRITICISMS AND ALTERNATIVES

This solution would be difficult and expensive to implement. It would require federal government legislation in the United States, and potentially in other countries sending email to the USA or receiving email from the USA.

An alternative approach is to develop AI systems which can automatically scan, identify, and remove spam, scam, and evil (e.g. virus-containing) emails before the emails are read by recipients. Such systems already exist, and current email systems like Microsoft Outlook do automatically identify and isolate junk email. Yet the problem remains, and billions of spam, scam, and virus-containing emails are sent and received daily in the United States. So, it appears the solution advocated in this paper needs to be considered.

And indeed, others have previously considered similar ideas. (3) It appears the main novelty in this paper’s proposal is the suggestion that all senders of emails would be required to pay a postage for each email destination address. This might require developing a completely separate email network, or layer on top of the current network. Or, it might be possible to implement within the current email network and internet - this will be a topic for future study, in developing the system.

DISCLAIMER

I am not an expert on email technology, just someone who has used email systems for many years. I’m writing this paper as a sort of ‘scientific duty’ after hearing about problems that friends have had with spam emails and email viruses.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Enoch Smith is a concerned US citizen, writing as a civic duty in the constructive tradition of Publius and the Federalist Papers. These writings should be evaluated solely on their facts and logic.

REFERENCES

(1)        Wikipedia (2025) “Email spam”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam

(2)      Email Tool Tester (2025) “Spam Statistics 2025: New Data on Junk Email, AI Scams & Phishing”.

https://www.emailtooltester.com/en/blog/spam-statistics/

(3)        Wikipedia (2024) “Cost-based anti-spam systems”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-based_anti-spam_systems

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[i] Zero email postage rates could be given to email newsgroups like foundations-of-mathematics, which broadcast email messages to hundreds of members for scientific communication.