Some pretty good idea's, sminneman.


I dont think I want bill gates taking my pc power away from me, and also a hack would usually be available somewhere.

But I have a website, where in theory it can generate a 'burst' of emails 100 wide, but directed to subscriber's, at any given point in time.

Consider how ATS used to send out email for every post and reply. Hundreds an hour I could guess.

I think charging or slowing up, email deliveries is a bad idea.

The right direction would be to allow for a 'do-not-spam' website, where your email addresses are listed that you do not want spammed. If you receive a spam from one of these registered addresses, forward it to the website, and the website then charges a legal spam operator whatever the rate is.

Of course all the fees in the world or regulations, are not going to stop the 'pirate' spammer. Nor will it cost him.

You're right Smirkley, it's hard to deter the rogue spammer. But it's not impossible.

Many business servers are doing "whitelist-only" acceptances, where all incoming messages are refused except those originating from one of a list of approved senders. Why not implement this web-wide, via a network akin to the SSL certificate system?

There seems to be nothing stopping this, aside from locating a company willing to coordinate and host the network.

Of course, if somebody DOES implement this, I demand royalties

Originally posted by sminneman
Also, I heard that the idea of "paying" for email is not restricted to just monetary payment. Gates mentioned another idea, where your computer would be forced to perform 10 seconds of computation before the mail is sent. That way spammers couldn't send 1000 emails a second. To send a million emails would take ten million seconds, or 115.74 days. Spam problem solved.

Would you all be willing to give up 10 seconds of computing time, in order to stop the spam deluge?

Well, that seems like the only way it could be done. It wouldhave to be built into the system, and be something that could be done universally.
It seems to my computer-challenged brain that they could no sooner change everyone for emails than they could enforce the sales tax issue on all vendors.