Re: Let's get started

> I think the fundamental problem is you can't determine who
> the original sender of the email is, to the extent of being able to
> fine them actual $$ if they are sending unsolicited email.  I don't think
> the problem will be fixed unless you have to put up an escrow fund with
> a recognized bank that someone can collect SPAM complaint fine money from
> in order to send email, and the bank would have a service where your
> escrow fund is listed along with how many emails you've sent against that
> fund in the last week.  If there are too many emails outstanding to
> be able to pay each recipient $5 out of the escrow fund you just
> bounce their email.  If you get an email, and you think its spam,
> you have a week from when its received to collect the $5.

This has similarities to an idea I mailed to this list some time ago;
"Macro payments through domain names?" (19 Jan). In your language,
that suggestion was to use top-level domain names as the "escrow
cost". In the event of someone receiving a spam email, he would put
the top-level domain on a permanent blacklist. For the sender of the
spam email to be able to continue sending emails, he would have to
pay for a new top-level domain name. The "authentication" could be
implemented as a dns lookup of the domain name.

The primary differences from your suggestion is that with domain
names, the recipient don't get the money. This I feel is an
improvment, since it avoids an incentive for scam-artists to attempt
to get people to send them emails that they can report as spam just
to get the money.

Due to rather recent figures,
  http://rejo.zenger.nl/abuse/1085493870.php
a spamrun of 272,455 spam emails gave orders worth about $22.
With bulk domain names at ~$5, at this rate we would have to
get them blacklisted as soon as they send 61,921 spams, or
when about 29,545 persons have opened and "read" the spam.

This does not sound impossible to me. Of course, if the costs turn
out to not be high enough, one could require more than one
blacklistable domain name to increase the "escrow".

//Rickard