Iljitsch writes: > The trouble is that on the internet, you can go > from house to house and try to break locks and > nobody will stop you. In the real world, you > wouldn't be able to do that for very long. Sure you could. But locks break so easily in the real world that most crooks don't have to bother. > Spam is so much out of control that any individual > spam isn't going to have much of a return, so they > need to send out even more of it. Since the cost of sending spam is negligeable, sending ten or fifteen million more isn't likely to be much of a deterrent. > So let's show some adaptability of our own and > plug those SMTP holes. Why does SMTP have "holes"? It does what it is supposed to. There isn't any way to automatically recognize spam, since it looks just like any other e-mail to a computer. > Someone's "home MTA" sould be able to simply rate > limit the number of messages an individual user gets > to inject into the global email distribution system. This assumes that the home MTA has an objective of limiting outgoing spam. But ISPs used by spammers aren't likely to care what they send out, as long as they pay their bills.