The ultimate spam solution

Posted Aug 26, 2006 21:16 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Fighting image spam by ekj
Parent article: Fighting image spam

I guess I don't know the technique you're alluding to. It's not clear to me how I would get someone to vouch for me as a non-spammer.

I don't think it's really possible to determine adequately whether a person is a spammer, and more to the point, whether a piece of email came from a spammer, so I think the ultimate solution will be financial accounting. If we can require payment to send an email into the Internet, the spammers and hammers will sort themselves out. As will the people with worm-infected computers.

Remember that what makes a spam annoying to you is the same thing that makes it worthless to the sender: you're not interested. If the spam cost the sender as much to send as it costs you to read/delete it, it wouldn't get sent.

But both plans assume it's possible to install a whole new system of email on the Internet. Looking at the failures so far, I'm starting to doubt we'll ever see a systemic fix to spam. Something like filtering that can be done one mailbox at a time may be our only hope.