Noel, > J. Noel Chiappa wrote: > The *only* thing that's going to stop spam is charging for > email. Everything else is a waste of time. I agree. The reason why junk paper mail and catalogs stay under control is because they cost a lot of money to send. > because you're going to run into impossible arguments > trying to define what's spam, and what's legitimate > bulk email. Yes. Sigh. > Needless to say, charging for email means changing the > underlying protocols. That's us. It's not going to be simple > (we need an underlying micro-payments system), I would like mega-payments please. > and it's going to take a lot of attention to detail > (q.v. IETF-Announce again), but I think it's the only > real cure. I think that I would like is a system that charges $20 for each email received. No money, no email. Then if the email is spam the recipient (me) keeps the money. You can be sure that at $20 a spam I would drop all my filters and begin to read them. If the email is not tagged as spam after say a week, the system charges it back. Such a system is going to be extremely difficult to deploy though. Michel.