Re: Hashcash for IM2000

Hashcash is a broken concept, as is any other solution that imposes a
'cost' on all mail.

As I see it, there's two answers that might work, and one is a lot easier
than the other;


1) Change mail so that the message sits on the spammer's machine until the
recipient requests it. This forces spammers to be more identifiable,
and transfers the 'cost' of mail back to the sender rather that imposing
an artificial cost. But it requires an overhaul of the entire mail system,
which is quite simply NOT going to happen. Ever. Forget it.


2) Change Terms Of Service, one ISP at a time, so that spammers incur a
cost for spam. "If you're caught using this ISP for spam then you will be
terminated, you will be billed an appropriate cleanup fee, and full
details of the 'incident' will be made available to other ISP's." - Most
users have no intention of spamming, so this doesn't affect them.

And perhaps, as my ISP has recently done, "you can be held responsible for
traffic on your connection, even if it was generated by an open proxy,
WiFi connection, or worm". A lot of users would probably object to this,
but if you're running an insecure machine that can be exploited by
spammers that's really not much better than spamming yourself..


Once a few ISP's come on-board they can give the users some options;
accept all mail, or only accept mail from other anti-spam ISP's, for
example. And existing filters like spamassassin will almost
certainly give mail from spam-hostile ISP's a big 'ham bonus'. You're
free to pick any ISP you want but if having your mail delivered is
important, you'll want to be on one that's spammer-hostile..


No change to the underlying mailsystem. No taxes. No laws. No government
involvement.


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