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Simple spam isn't the biggest problem for email providers at the moment; rather, it's (1) phishing and various other forms of fraud and (2) false-positive tagging of non-spam mail as spam. The customer service demands due to these problems are burgeoning as spammers and phishers get more and more sophisticated and numerous, and the pressure for providers to accept at least some financial responsibility for fraud is mounting. If this sort of paid certification were restricted to transactional messages (statements, order confirmations, and other such non-marketing commercial email), it might have a beneficial effect. But using it for marketing will wind up killing any usefulness it might otherwise have had.
