NEW YORK, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- The battle against junk e-mail has both Microsoft and Yahoo considering implementing e-stamps, or fees to send messages, the New York Times said Monday.
Of the two companies -- the largest e-mail systems in the world -- Yahoo is evaluating an e-mail postage plan being developed by Goodmail, a Silicon Valley start-up company.
Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo's manager for communications products, said the company is intrigued by the idea of postage because it would force mailers to send only those offers a significant number of people might accept.
"All of a sudden, spammers can't behave without regard for the Internet providers' or end users' interests, " he said.
Microsoft has been floating a proposal labeled "caller ID" that could be expanded in the future to accommodate more sophisticated anti-spam approaches including Internet postage systems.
In the meantime, the big Internet providers in recent weeks have renewed talks that stalled last year about creating technological standards to help identify the senders of legitimate e-mail. That way, spammers would either have to identify themselves or risk that users would discard all anonymous mail.
