Yet Another Plan To Stop Spam

from the implementation? dept

I guess this is spam week. Here's another story with an idea about how to prevent spam. The idea is to combine two ideas that have been discussed previously. First, start having ISPs charge for emails sent. Include about 1,000 free emails per month so your average person has no problem, and then make the additional fees very small - but noticeable if you're sending out millions of messages. Or, possibly allow people to get out of paying fees if they can prove they're legit. Second, is to somehow require real sender identification information - and have a system to automatically block any email that doesn't have this authentication. They're both interesting ideas, but they seem way too costly to implement - and I wouldn't be surprised if spammers found their way around both very quickly. Update: Another spam story. This one, though, looks at spam recently received to say what it says about us. If spam really reflects what online folks want, then it turns out that we're all short on cash, obsessed with porn, sexually insecure, overweight, spammers ourselves, obsessed with movies, and very very gullible.