I believe that it is not enough to just keep developing ever more complex
methods of filtering out spam, the spammers will just continue to circumvent
the filters. Witness the recent use of spacing between letters such as
"L_O_OS_E W_E_I_G_H_T" in emails.
Instead I suggest that the detection software at ISPs should respond to the
spam it detects. This wouldn't effect the few false positives that are found,
in fact it would be a service as it would advise them to rephrase their subject
line.
Spam works like all mass marketing by fooling a small percentage of those
contacted into responding, if a high percentage responded then their system
would collapse or at least become a lot more expensive to run. If the detection
software used by ISPs harvested the unsubscribe email addresses or links from
the spam and responded to them wit false emails then the computers of the
spammer would be overwhelmed. AT the every least it would kill the unsubscribe
link.
Pinging every spam link discovered would dramatically increase the bandwidth
the spammer was using and therefore their costs.
And low cost is what makes spam so attractive.
That's my contribution to the debate, I don't have the technical expertise to
know how to do this but it seems relatively cheap and simple to implement to me.
Richard Warwick