I take your point MikeyB but this is not what we are suggesting here.
Suppose "Snail Mail" became free for all users sending out mail and as a result the commercial companies and others all started flooding the network with junk mail.
The inevitable result would be that all mail would get bogged down by the sheer weight of the junk causing delays and increasing costs to the point the whole system would break down.
Would your solution in this case be to want the postman to knock on your door and say, "ok we have split the mail in to two piles, one pile appears to be junk the other appears to be OK sorry it is two days late but we have too much mail to handle now".
Or would you rather someone at the local sorting office kept track of all the obvious junk and delivered it straight back to the person that sent it when that sender is know to be on a list of abusers of the system and is repeating previous misuse of the system.
This second option would reduce the impact of the junk mail freeing up the system to improve and maintain efficient delivery of the legitamate mail.
Yes the odd letter might get treated inappropriately but the sender would be made aware of this by its return to them. They can then make arrangements to have themselves eliminated from any list of automatically rejected mail by confirming it is legitamate.
OK maybe the example is a little far fetched but come to think of it if this could be applied to the Royal Mail too I could eventually get off the Readers Digest mailing list.
