...against spam. It's an interesting history, but a little depressing.

[Via Geek Press]

The only way to stop spam is to make each email account into a 900 number where senders pay and recipients receive money for each email. Short of that, round 1 is to use the same tactics Rand does to prevent blog spam (word filtering). Round 2 which I have a patent pending on will be to use audio and video to get your message across without any text that can offend in the cover email. This has started a little bit. Whitelists only work well for people who don't mind annoying their correspondents. Black lists don't work because new spammers pop up by the instant.

Well let us hope that Congress puts the fork to the clueless "Net Neutrality" teenybopper BitTorrent screwheads, because one obvious solution is for ISPs to start charging differentially for data transport.

That is, Roadrunner and Cox can monitor just how much port 25 traffic (e-mail) you're sending, and if turns out to be a billion packets an hour -- why, let's start charging you $0.001 per packet! Problem solved!

Of course, this will start out being a world of hurt for some people, since most spam these days comes from botnets. All those people running bots will get shocking huge bills from their ISPs the first month. But I'm guessing it will only happen in the first month. Nothing like the threat of a $800/month cable bill to make you carefully secure your system (or pay someone to do it).

No, problem not solved. My postal mailbox is full every day with stuff that costs $1 to produce and mail. You may increase the quality of the spam slightly, but to get spam down to the level of junk mail in your postal mailbox, you have to charge more per piece for electronic spam than paper spam since there are no duplication costs to the sender.

Oh, geez, Sam, I dream of the day when my electronic mailbox is only as stuffed with junk as my real mailbox. What's that, like a whole six to ten pieces of junk per day? That would bring the signal-to-noise ratio of my e-mail up to 3.0 or more! Frabjous day!

You may increase the quality of the spam slightly

Perhaps more than slightly, if it costs senders a penny apiece. And if it increases enough, it's no longer spam but valuable commercial offers, yes?

I admit, the best solution is allowing me, the customer, to set the rates for sending me e-mail. Folks who like getting ads for penile pills can set the rate for sending them random e-mail at zero, and people who want only the most valuable and personally targeted offers can set it at $50. I would probably gladly read any random e-mail if the sender was willing to pay me $50 to do so. Gosh, send me a bunch! At 100 a day I can just quit my job...

If society can decide gambling debts are void as against public policy, why not charges for spam purchases?