Steve Atkins,
Thank you, that article, summarizing decades of research, does both pertain to
and discuss the concepts that I broached. A technical topic not mentioned in
that article specifically is the use of the sender's email address, recipient's
email address, and the date and time of the message event to seed or salt a
random number generator.
I think that a quote from that article expresses a premise of the idea well:
"the theory is that spammers, whose business model relies on their ability to
send large numbers of emails with very little cost per message, cannot afford
this investment into each individual piece of spam they send. Receivers can
verify whether a sender made such an investment and use the results to help
filter email."
It appears that your counterpoint is also indicated in that article which
describes "botnets or cluster farms with which spammers can increase their
processing power enormously."
As you might be aware, earlier this year, in the Journal of Economic
Perspectives, in an article titled The Economics of Spam, Justin Rao of
Microsoft and David Reiley of Google estimated the cost of spam to society
relative to its worldwide revenues. The societal price tag was indicated as $20
billion while the total revenue of all spammers was indicated as $200 million.
Various policy proposals designed to solve the spam problem were discussed in
that publication (http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.26.3.87,
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.26.3.87).
There may be more than one criterion for success, simultaneously, with regard
to anti-spam discussions: (1) the total elimination of spam, (2) a reduction of
spam, and (3) solutions which affect the economics of spam in attempts to
reduce spam (2). It could be that your conclusion addresses one criterion (1),
while other criteria (2) and (3) could be achieved by increasing the
computational costs of sending and receiving emails.
Also, what might you think about discussions about versioning and advancing
email protocols, modernizing email-related computer networking protocols?
Kind regards,
Adam
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