GridEmail: A Case for Economically Regulated Internet-based Interpersonal Communications

Email has emerged as a dominant form of electronic communication between people. Spam is a major problem for email users, with estimates of up to 56% of email falling into that category [13]. Control of Spam is being attempted with technical [38-44] and legislative [19 -36] methods. In this paper we look at email and spam from a supply-demand perspective. We propose Gridemail, an email system based on an economy of communicating parties, where participants’ motivations are represented as pricing policies and profiles. This system is expected to help people regulate their personal communications to suit their conditions, and help in removing unwanted messages.