Solving Spam - Why nothing seems to work...

The CAN-SPAM act is now over 3 years old. I think I can say pretty definitively, it did nothing to mitigate the problem.

Yahoo! and Microsoft have supported near-identical sender authentication schemes. In retrospect, it seems these efforts were more geared towards messing with the SMTP protocol for the sake of shifting things towards proprietary standards as opposed to really doing anything about UCE.

Bill Gates and myself (me and Bill are pretty tight) have also suggested schemes to make people pay a small amount for each email sent. The payment could either be in the form of money or computing time. Again, no nice dice.

Email spam filtering obviously does work to some extent. Otherwise, SpamButcher wouldn't make me dozens of dollars each year. Still, it's apparent that filters only reduce the toll of spam on users. They don't get to the root of the problem.

So, if you want to be looked upon as a super-genius by the rest of the world; all you need to do is come up with a technology that fulfills the following conditions.

1. You make spam fundamentally unprofitable for spammers. Spam is about money. The only way to beat spam is to take the money out of it.

2. Whatever you think up for number one, doesn't somehow break email as we know it.

3. Your miracle spam email killer doesn't require that, "everyone just needs to do X, Y and Z on the count of three" to make it work. Standards on the internet change slowly. If a new standard requires everyone implement it before anyone sees anyone sees any benefit - it won't get deployed at all.

Easy enough?

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