I'm surprised to see so little focus so far on the underlying cause of the
problem. The economic model of email is fundamentally broken, and that
CREATES the spam problem. "We have met the enemy, and they is us."
In simplest terms, email is NOT free, but because we pretend it is free,
from the spammers' perspective, they are simply dividing by zero. It doesn't
matter if they send out 100 million pieces of spam if they think their
"costs" are low enough. Any return, even a single sucker who sends them $5,
looks like an infinite return on the "investment" of zero. Of course, even
for the spammers the costs are not really zero, but it looks close enough to
them. Interesting combination of cunning and stupidity, neh? In reality they
are poisoning the well, but they fantasize about getting rich NOW. Ergo, the
spam.
Solution? Obvious. Alternate economic model. Why not use an extended header
line for postage-paid email? Anyone who routes their email address through
such an extended SMTP server will receive NO MORE SPAM. No ifs, ands, buts.
(Well, one it. The postage has to be securely encrypted, but that's a solved
problem.) Any email coming from that routing would be absolutely safe. You
would know that someone actually put their money in front of their mouth and
paid the postage. No effect on the rest of the email world, but the people
in that corner know they would get no spam.
P.S. This system would support natural extensions for legitimate
advertising, and I can actually see email service providers acting as
mediated advertisers. On the one side they would protect your privacy and
give you powerful control over the kind of advertising you want to see, even
including commissions for receiving it (as a legitimate and qualified
customer, but without actually revealing any personal information in
public). On the other side, they would be selling email access to those
customers.
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