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miriam_eIt occurred to me that perhaps the biggest problem is in how email is set up to work just like snail-mail. You write a letter, send it, it arrives at the destination, and the recipient plucks it from their mailbox to read it.
But email doesn't need to work like that. It is electronic, with all sorts of wonderful capabilities conferred by the different medium. We should use those capabilities to advantage.
We could effectively eliminate spam by the sender simply notifying the recipient that they have an email for them. The receiver then acknowledges that they'd like to accept the email... or not. This has a subtle effect. If the user has to explicitly request the email then it must be fetched from the sender. This makes it useless to forge the sender address because the email can't be delivered from an address that is not genuine. Spammers would gain nothing by forging addresses. Forcing spammers to use genuine addresses would make it easy to block them and for police to nab their slimy asses.
But email doesn't need to work like that. It is electronic, with all sorts of wonderful capabilities conferred by the different medium. We should use those capabilities to advantage.
We could effectively eliminate spam by the sender simply notifying the recipient that they have an email for them. The receiver then acknowledges that they'd like to accept the email... or not. This has a subtle effect. If the user has to explicitly request the email then it must be fetched from the sender. This makes it useless to forge the sender address because the email can't be delivered from an address that is not genuine. Spammers would gain nothing by forging addresses. Forcing spammers to use genuine addresses would make it easy to block them and for police to nab their slimy asses.