Re: spam

J. Noel Chiappa wrote:

> The *only* thing that's going to stop spam is charging for email. Everything
> else is a waste of time, because you're going to run into impossible
> arguments trying to define what's spam, and what's legitimate bulk email
> (q.v. the recent message about IETF-Announce email).
    That's an interesting argument. I suspect I've missed a lot of the 
prior discussion, since I'm not sure how charging for email would work 
(Who charges? Who pays? Could it ever work in a free market? Aren't 
there legal implications?).
    It was your "only" that caught my attention, though. Being able to 
pick and choose my email addresses, I have had a reasonable amount of 
success using different email addresses for different stores and 
subscriptions: if an address begins to collect an unreasonable amount of 
spam, I stop using it. One "technical" solution that would discourage 
spam would be to add a key (a text string, for example) to the email 
header. The user gives out their email address with different keys to 
different groups of people; if a key attracts spam, all they have to do 
is stop accepting mail with that key. It would also make organising mail 
very easy. On the negative side, the extra complexity might prove 
challenging for some...

Andrew.
--
Andrew Shore.