What would victory actually look like? To me, it would be keeping the crap
off my network in the first place. Forcing people to engage in full-time
warfare with the ethically bankrupt is not a victory.
The best techical solution that has been proposed seems to be the
"tarpit" solution: detect spam on the fly and slow down the reception
to trickle as "spamminess" grows. The great feature of this is, that
it actually would keep spam "off my network" by stopping the flow.
I would think technically, one would run a frontend tarpit pipeline on
the standard SMTP port as follows
port 25
--------> TARPIT ----> real SMTP on other port or host
^
|
SpamRules
TARPIT would listen incoming connections, establish another connection
to real SMTP server. It would examine the data on fly and slow the
incoming reception when the spam index grows. Mail would not be
rejected, just slowed, as "spammines index" grows.
Of course, this solution only works if you are receiving your mail
directly. If you receive your mail via mail forwarder, this won't help
-- the mail forwarder must be using it.