Is Spam theft?

[dsm]

What do you think is more cost effective - making spam illegal and locking up a few hundred criminals (data shows many spammers have previous form) or that billions of people need to purchace and maintain anti spam software?

Actually, the technology is potentially cheaper than you might think. The problem is that there is no (or little) incentive for companies to implement it currently. Let me restate the technology I'm suggesting (I'm refining my idea as this discussion progresses).

There are two areas that need to be addressed in securing the Internet mail system:

1. The user's mail reader.
2. The mail server.

Securing #1 would mostly involve public key encryption and digital signatures. Many people already have this software and it will probably be embedded in all mail readers in the near future. The problem here is that "good" encryption is something the government doesn't like. The other problem is that standardizing the encryption software cuts off innovation in the market. These problems can be overcome if the market demands it.

Securing #2 also involves public key encryption and digital signatures. Using this, mail servers could be setup to accept only mail from other servers that properly "sign" their transmissions. By then setting up more mail servers around the world such that there are more layers in the transmission of email, it becomes more easily possible to trace the route of SPAM and cutoff servers that are regularly spamming (simply disallow mail that is signed by them). The tools are not that hard to implement, but what company would view this as a profittable business?

With the above, laws make more sense as they now have something more concrete to dig into rather than "ghosts" that can't be traced.

 

[AlienX]

See the above posts where it is clearly stated that they know who is to blame for 90% of the spam.
What ghosts are you on about?, the ghosts are the minority here, stoping these 180 main offendors instantly will wipe out 4 billion spam mails per day!.

All your solutions are already in use but they are never 100% effective in that they allow spam through and also block legitimate mail.

It's extremely unlikely that any for of software protection will work 100% and if it does how long before the spammers find a way around it?


AX