Involve money to kill SPAM?
It is annoying and there is no escape from it: SPAM is there, it gets through all sorts of filters, trying to sell you “medicine” (snakeoil was it called in the wild west, i guess) or offering you to transfer 10 million dollar from the former president of Nagigunia, somewhere in Africa…
One of my email accounts on AOL is over 9 years old now and I used it heavily in the late 90s. Meanwhile that account gets around 100 spam emails per hour and I do not use it anymore. Let’s keep it as a honeypot for the spam bees 
So some smart people think of the good old concept “stamp” for delivering mail. IMHO the right approach, but not if you have to pay for it for every transaction. It should be a one time fee, then it would make sense.
Furthermore I see a problem in the US-centric approach and the hurdles that would be put up for poor people using email without any chance of registering anything anywhere.
My suggestion to fight spam would be a multi-level approach:
- Mail has a signed certificate: goes through in any case
- Mail is from a registered sender: ok
- None of the above: strong filtering
I guess over time a lot of people would get certificates - but to be honest: I think the right leverage would be a clean and good configured mail client for the masses, without the availability of any other chance than a clean one.
As long as a computer layman needs to install, configure, setup, register, etc. there will be no solution to SPAM. Remember SPAM does not work on those, who know what it is about and how they can prevent it. SPAM works on people who use their computer 3 times a week to do some banking or look at an ebay auction. We need an easy point and click solution for those, not for the techno savy ubergeeks!
(0)
October 24th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
Considering that a lot of so-called SPAM is the fault of Internet affilliate programs that encourage the members to use autoresponders and harvesting software while also telling them that SPAMMING is prohibited, (mixed message if I ever saw one) and what cannot be chalked up to this source, can be placed at the doorstep of the little check boxes one usually has to tick a few of simply to join most free membership sites…(and guess what those little opt-in tickboxes are tied to? If you guessed the affilliate autoresponders, you scored 100) I now wonder if 98% of what the modern Internet user considers junk email, is actually the user’s own fault?
If you volunteer by stating interest, (and there is a bit of fine print telling you that you are opting in to a mailing list by doing this as a rule) then legally you are not being SPAMMED. Some sites are now beginning to threaten lawsuit filings on users who opt-in then report such sites as sending them SPAM.
Just looking ahead to the future here…
Jocelyn (HSUK)
October 22nd, 2006 at 10:45 am
only 1 way to kill spam:
kill offending website, charge owner for time lost [at business rate or $30 to $1,000 per hour] and confiscate everything they own, clean out their bank accounts, drop them in middle of desert with no water in hot season ,, no more spam and might replenish desert
Senior Network Security Analyst / coder since 1981