Stamps don't solve spam, gmail solves spam

Yahoo and AOL have come up with an expensive, complicated scheme to reduce spam. They resort to these measures for two reasons. First, they don't seem to be capable of solving the spam problem technically. Second, and more important, they can make millions of dollars charging people to send us email.

Instead, why don't Yahoo and AOL fix the spam problem technically? Google seems to have done it. I dropped Yahoo Mail in favor of gmail for a bunch of reasons, but one of the more important ones is that I get no spam at gmail. And I know of spam. Among other email addresses, I have tim@nerds.com forwarding to my gmail box. That address is one of my oldest and is a spam firehose. Thousands of spam messages a day. Yet gmail sorts it all out, and I don't see any spam.

If you want to solve the spam problem, don't be held hostage by AOL and Yahoo. Simply switch to gmail.