Stopping Spam Email - What Can Be Done?

There have been numerous technical and legal efforts aimed at stopping spam email, but so far none of succeeded to any substantial end.

End-users looking to reduce the amount of spam they get have numerous options. There are countless different spam email programs, and filtering services; including the one offered by this site. All of them do help address the problem on a personal level, but don't do anything to systematically prevent the junk from being sent.

One possibility to solve the spam problem relies on requiring a certain amount of computational effort to be expended to send any email. For normal users of email, requiring 10 seconds of CPU time in order to send a message doesn't present a problem. Senders of thousands of messages would find their computers tied up for long periods of time. Unfortunately, spammers have increasingly utilized hijacked computers to send their advertisements. This would help allow them to circumvent this kind of spam stopping strategy.

Other recent developments have been geared around confirming the identity of a message's sender. While this can cut down on phishing oriented spam, it's not a general solution for blocking spam.

Spam has real and substantial costs related to it. IT departments at companies throughout the world spend countless hours deploying software aimed at stopping spam email. While server and client based software can help address the issue, larger-scale initiatives that make spamming inherently impractical and unprofitable need to be considered.

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