You could stop spam by simplifying email: centralize functions like identity
verification, limit the number of authorized mail agents and refuse service
to unauthorized agents, even set up tollbooths where small sums of money are
collected for every email, ensuring that sending ten million messages was too
expensive to contemplate without a damned high expectation of return on investment.
If you did all these things, you'd solve spam.
By breaking email.
Small server processes that mail a logfile to five sysadmins every hour just
in case would be prohibitively expensive. Convincing the soviet that your bulk-mailer
was only useful to legit mailing lists and not spammers could take months, and
there's no guarantee that it would get their stamp of approval at all. With
verified identity, the NYTimes couldn't impersonate you when it forwarded stories
on your behalf -- and Chinese dissidents couldn't send out their samizdata via
disposable gmail accounts.
