I came up with a possible spam solution that had quite a bit in common
with Jason Hihn's proposal. Of course, I think mine's better in some
important respects, but I would, wouldn't I? :-)
However, I'm not going to write it up, because it has the same problem
as Jason's: there's no clear route from here to there. It requires
e-mail to be sent via a fundamentally different protocol, rather than
SMTP. There's no gain for early adopters, just expense and a limited
audience.
It strikes me that there might be a way to get such a thing rolled out,
however. Just don't call it e-mail.
For years now, we've been waiting for a unifying instant messaging and
presence system. What if one was built, and it also had "delayed
instant messages", which used this new e-m**l protocol that was
spam-resistant?
Initially people would use the new system as their IM system; since
there's not much good competition in IM, it wouldn't be impossible to
give early adopters a clear gain. People are used to running IM
alongside their existing e-mail client. Then as time went on, they'd
start using the unified IM system for the messages currently sent by
e-mail...
If we got assistance from the big boys (like AOL), we could get
interoperability with the current IM systems. That would be a massive
gain that would drive rapid adoption.
mathew
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