Biting the Bullet - Who Could Solve Spam in 1 Year?

From a technology standpoint spam is a solvable problem. Only moderate changes would need to be made to SMTP to allow for "electronic postage" which would in effect "charge" computing cycles to anyone who wanted to send email.

After such changes to underlying protocols, other methods to filter email spam wouldn't be needed.

In short, it would limit a given computer to sending out only a certain number of messages in a certain period of time. Usually, it's not necessary for a desktop system to send out more than say 50 pieces of email in an hour. However if this limitation could somehow be universally enforced, it would make spam sending campaigns largely ineffective.

The problem is the, "no, you first" phenomenon. No one wants to be the first party to start rejecting messages from other people who haven't deployed whatever some new standard requires.

Still, a few email players are so large, they might be able to force the issue on the rest of the internet. Imagine if AOL started bouncing any email that was remotely suspicious (contained an image, was from out of country, or even just had a "$" sign in it) whenever it didn't have electronic postage proving it wasn't spam?

How long would it take for anyone serious about email to make sure their email client or server supported electronic postage?

The risk is high - but the real opportunity to finally kick spam in the butt exists. The gotcha is that by so aggressively blocking junk mail (and other legitimate messages) - they'd risk putting their users through hell.

So who could do it?

Microsoft

AOL

SpamAssassin

A combination of others

So again, the problem is solvable. It just requires that for a moment, some company decide to act against its own short-term best interest. OK, maybe the problem isn't solvable after all.

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