I fully understand that this is not a technical discussion but rather codes
of conduct, etc. However, I have a solution to spam and I would like to
share it with you all. Hopefully, one of you knows people who deal with
this and can examine implementations.
I have been reading the open letter regarding spam by Bill Gates. I used to
work for MSN UK as technical support and I addressed this issue with them in
1997/1998. At that stage MSN's email servers were open to the world,
although filters were in place, I found that I could send spam without to
many problems.
I have considered this problem extensivly for the last 5 or 6 years and have
developed a solution. This solution is highly cost-effective and eliminates
challange-response systems.
The solution is simple:
1. Limit the number of recipients for each email. For domestic use, 10 or
20 is quite adaquate. Emails with more recipients than the allowed limit
should automatically be spanned as separate emails.
2. A 10-15 second delay between emails should be imposed.
3. Each email request should force a graphic to be loaded to the email
client with an obscured word on it. This graphic should be random.
4. Each uploaded email should have a random ID appended to its header as an
authorisation code.
5. The recipient's email server should then confirm the code with the
sending server. If the code does not exist then the email is destroyed
without notification.
So, let us do our sums on this, for an average spammer. We'll assume that
the email has 1000 recipients. We'll perform the calculations for a limit
sizes of 10 recipients per email.
1000 recipients at a limit of 10 per email would result in 100 emails.
100 * 10 seconds delay = 1000 seconds or about 16 minutes.
add 100 * 5 second delay for loading of each authorisation graphic = 500
seconds or about 8 minutes.
That's a total of 24 minutes to send 1000 recipients.
In the open letter, it states that several spammers were being prosecuted
for sending more than 2 Billion emails. If this system was in operation,
and even only 1 Billion emails were sent, that would have taken about
400,000 hours or 16,666 days (around 45 years or so).
This coupled with the authorisation code will practically result in the
complete elimination of spam on the internet if universally adopted. Please
feel free to play with the figures until an adaquate balance is achieved.
The adaptations required to implement this are of a minor nature compared
with other programming tasks and can be released as updates to existing
servers and client software.