Here’s some respite for people plagued with spam messages in their mailbox and redemption from telemarketers. A new email forwarding service, called boxbe.com, makes advertisers (spammers) pay for access to people’s inboxes, and that money goes straight to people who receive the spam! The service aims to give users, control over messages they receive, and gives them access to ads that they might prefer to see while actually getting paid for that promo.
To use the service, users need to sign up for a Boxbe email address. When users publish their Boxbe IDs on a public site, the service will automatically filter spam and forward mail to the user’s private account at Gmail, Hotmail, or any other email service. Boxbe promises to ensure that no spam reaches a private e-mail address other than the promotion that a user would not mind getting from a pre-specified advertiser.
Another service, Junkbusters.com, aims to 'free the world of junk communications' by enabling people to block out junk fax and spam, on mobile phone networks. Users wanting to rid themselves of calls from telemarketers may down load an 'out of service tone' or any automated message that can fool a telemarketers’ database, from Junkbusters.
The bad news is, that these services are available only in the US, but at the rate Indians are importing and even developing our own technology, service like these may soon be a reality here too.
Read more here.
While economic solutions to spam are an interesting idea, this is a terrible implementation. It's a challenge/response scheme. Like all of these things, there's a fundamental flaw: you can't reply to spammers -- replies go to innocent 3rd parties because spammers forge the return address.\r\n\r\nin other words, this actually creates more spam. 
