Spam blocking with law and technology

Spam blocking with law and technology

Posted Jun 28, 2003 11:37 UTC (Sat) by copsewood (subscriber, #199)
In reply to: Spam blocking with law by giraffedata
Parent article: Spam blocking with greylisting

Yes having a microtransaction supported mail system could be very useful, but this goes way beyond SMTP - more a new kind of messaging service altogether. Introducing microtransactions is very difficult, partly due to the psychological preference people seem to have for unmetered but known fixed monthly bills. When microtransactions become a reality, in my understanding this is likely to be based on a similar model to the highly decentralised one I am researching.

An area where the law could have useful impact would be by agreeing large fines and bounties obtainable by those bringing prosecutions and evidence anywhere the spammer is based against a non-controversial definition of the worst kind of spam, i.e. the kind deliberately using outgoing addresses involving domains belonging to innocent third parties (forged letterheads in other words). This is a form of criminal deception which prevents use of the reply button with a complaint being effective. By making this criminal deception very expensive it then becomes much easier to tune technological measures using origin blacklists against mass mailers who don't use confirmed opt-in list management methods or proper complaint handling.

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