Comment Make Email have an implicit cost (Score 1) 655
I think that a a great solution to spam would be digital signatures and encryption. If everyone used, say, GPG to encrypt and/or sign all their emails spam would whither. Here's why:
1) The process of encrypting emails takes a sufficient number of cycles that it is no longer "free" to send out 1 million emails. Suddenly just the process of encrypting the email costs enough cycles that spammers will be limited by a CPU bottleneck. If it was reasonable to reject un-encrypted email because encryption was standard, then voila much less spam.
2) Secondly, even just digital signatures would be an incremental improvement because it gives a good idea (but not guarantee) of who the email came from. It is certainly harder to steal a private key and password than it is to spoof a return address. Subsequently one could black-list the offending digital signatures because unless your friends are spammers, then the signature belongs to a spammer or has been comprimised.
I love KMail from KDE because it makes encryption and digital signatures very close to seamless and therefore makes the solution that I mention above more likely to come about.
1) The process of encrypting emails takes a sufficient number of cycles that it is no longer "free" to send out 1 million emails. Suddenly just the process of encrypting the email costs enough cycles that spammers will be limited by a CPU bottleneck. If it was reasonable to reject un-encrypted email because encryption was standard, then voila much less spam.
2) Secondly, even just digital signatures would be an incremental improvement because it gives a good idea (but not guarantee) of who the email came from. It is certainly harder to steal a private key and password than it is to spoof a return address. Subsequently one could black-list the offending digital signatures because unless your friends are spammers, then the signature belongs to a spammer or has been comprimised.
I love KMail from KDE because it makes encryption and digital signatures very close to seamless and therefore makes the solution that I mention above more likely to come about.
