Fake currency for e-mail? What a horrible idea

I don’t know about anyone else, but I think this WoW-inspired Attent system is a bad idea:

Known as Attent, Seriosity’s system is essentially a new currency—called the Serio—that corporate e-mail users spend to indicate a message’s importance: the more important they believe the message is, the more Serios they spend on it. Recipients keep the Serios in the messages they get.

But Serios is a currency, and therefore a scarce resource, so people get a limited amount. The idea is that they have to spend the currency wisely, always making sure they have enough to send more with future messages.

Wha??

It sounds as though e-mails without any Serios attached to “pay” for them don’t get through the system. That’s stupid. What if I spend all my Serios and then NEED to get an e-mail through, quickly? Tough luck.

Also, the system says it’s supposed to help big companies manage the time people spend sorting through e-mails. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m the type of person who would write an e-mail, and then spend 5 or 10 minutes trying to figure out the right number of Serios to attach. My productivity would drop through the basement.

Fake currency for e-mail delivery is *not* the spam solution, the same way that *real* postage for e-mail is not the solution.