Spam

Recently I heard some of our distinguished representatives in Congress were even thinking of outlawing sending too much mail. Now that, I think, is a grand idea -- except there will be so many loopholes in it, and it will be so unenforceable that the majority of spammers will just keep on spamming.

Now this got me thinking, though. How would you make sure that no one sent out too many emails... what if you set up toll booths on the internet that polled how much email someone was sending?

Now, you couldn't really set that up... not the way people envision freeways and toll booths. But what you could do is have each email address subscribe to a ticket collector (or toll booth, as it were). This toll booth would be responsible for handing out tickets that each email had embedded in the header. These tickets would describe how used an email-address was (how many letters it had sent that month, that day, that hour). Now any email filter in the world could stop spam just by checking the header.

"Jason, you're silly... why wouldn't the spammers just leave off the header?"

Well, the filters could just reject any letter that didn't have the ticket header.

"Jason, you don't get it -- most of these spammers have their own email sending applications -- why won't they just craft bogus ticket headers?"

Well, the tickets would be double checked with the toll booth that handed out the ticket. Valid tickets go through, invalid tickets get reports of abuses.

"Jason, get this through your thick skull -- if they could bogus up the applications that send the spam, why couldn't they bogus up the toll booths?"

Ah... yes, a little more tricky, but that's where the wonder of the internet comes in -- there would be toll booth validators. These validators would hold a list of those toll booths that the validators considered acceptable, and those toll booths that the validators considered unethical. Spam violators would be reported to the validators, and boom, they'd be off the list.

Every email filter that scanned by tickets would listen to one or more validators out there on the internet. You could have large ISPs (like AOL) run validators, or places like the realtime-black-hole-list organization, or whoever -- and each filter operator would subscribe to those that they thought mirrored their own personal spam beliefs. Companies would pay for professions validators, the great clueless masses going with whoever their ISPs stuck them with, and the rabid children of the internet going with the RBL sites...

"But Jason, people like the RBL organization already exist... why not just go with them?"

Well, frankly, the RBL are a little too rabid, and it really cripples an ISP to be shutdown for something that they can't know about until it's too late. You have some spammer set up shop in an unsuspecting ISP, then after the spam waves have been sent out the RBL shuts the poor ISP down until they suspend the spammers. It's hard on the ISP and it's hard on all the innocent ISP clients. Furthermore, it's often just a little too late -- the spammer has taken up shop and moved to greener pastures.

With a polling booth situation, only those that fraudulently allow massive amounts of email to be ticketed get shut down.

Or, at least, that's the way I see it. Can anyone spot the errors in my logic? I can see a slight delay as each ticket is validated, but since we're already having our email filters validate the addresses of senders in the first place, the validation wouldn't take much more time.