Long Term Prospects for Spam Free Email

Spam has been a major problem for about half a decade now. Billions of junk messages flow throughout the net on a daily basis. The loss in personal time and productivity is almost incalculable.

So what are the prospects of it going away? We already know a few things that don't work.

For one, making spam illegal hasn't made a measurable difference. Yes, CAN-SPAM didn't actually outlaw spam, but the large majority of junk email isn't compliant with it, and is therefore illegal. Scaling up enforcement could certainly help, but presumably there are legal and funding limitations preventing that. In addition, stopping spam sent from over-seas would be impractical and possibly lack legal grounds.

Spam blocker programs are a great personal solution. However, spam is profitable enough where spammers are still motivated even if 95% of their junk gets blocked. The most aggressive spammers employ seriously nasty tactics to defeat filtering technology. If spam filter adoption were to go up further, they would become even more aggressive. One of the major advantages of using "zombies" or "botnets" is that they make certain technologies for blocking junk e-mail ineffective.

Other approaches against spam rely on a notion that I like to refer to as the "if everybody would just..." syndrome. If everybody would just not by anything from spammers, the problem would go away.

If everybody would just reconfigure their email servers so that they comply with standard XYZ, the problem would go away.

You get the idea. The problem is that any possible solution has to be deployable incrementally, with upfront benefits for both system administrators and users immediately.

A unique system of electronic postage may provide one possible tactic that meets these criteria. A complete strategy to end spam may involve deploying multiple new technologies.

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