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The big thing is that email is one of the "killer apps" of the Internet. Any anti-Spam solution has to be universal. I do not see micropayments for email ever being universal. This would mean that every single ISP across the globe would have to go to it to truly work.

Why does it have to be universal? And why does every single ISP have to do it?

Let's look at existing anti-SPAM measures, like MAPS and RFC-Ignorant. As such businesses like to point out, they are not a filter or censor - they are merely a list which individuals and groups may choose to use to filter their email. The same is even more true at the MUA level, where individuals may or may not use or implement filtering (such as SpamAssassin Pro)

Also, the need for it is not universal, so why need the solution be? How much is your time worth? Would it be worth it to you to charge - and be charged - a miniscule amount to have a reasonably clear email stream? How about your mother? How about the CEO of your company? Different people have different thresholds of need, and different willingness to pay and/or inconvenience their correspondents.

Systems already exist which automate the process of kicking unknown sender's mail back with instructions on how to overcome the block - again, it's something individuals choose to use today, without killing the "universal" nature of email.

And you do not get to the real question: How is micropayments for email not a step backwards.

It is a given that the problem with SPAM is that it costs the sender nothing, and there is no market restraint upon it. Therefore, I took it as a given that some form of cost is involved in the solution. You take that as a backwards step. I don't neccessarily agree - but I retain the right not to send people email if I don't feel they are worth dropping .001 cents on.

Not everything that is free is good, and not everything which costs is bad.

(You also decided not to touch upon the issue that a lot of people have problems with PayPal, the example you decided to use - these types of problems are always going to arise when it comes to a universal system involving people's money)

Of course not - because such problems are not unique to the Internet or Micropayments, but have existed since Ogg first required Mog to exchange clam shells for food. It is a given that such a system will either be regulated or not, and will either be trustworthy or not. It is also a given that even with the best controls, someone somewhere will get scalped someday, because humans suck.

SpamAssassin is ready for exchange.

Deersoft.com

Dare I say it, my wife's work uses Windows desktops. She answers an email address that gets several hundred spams per day. She is trialing SpamAssassin Pro with Outlook, it seems to be doing good so far.

SpamAssassin Pro also has an enterprise version for Exchange, but I can imagine a lot of Exchange admins fearing fooling around with it too much.

I work on the helpdesk of a small ISP; I also take care of the spam filtering, and answer abuse@. We recently added SpamAssassin, and God does it rock. (The big spike you see is me getting MRTG to graph what SA catches now; it's 6-10 times better than what we used to catch.)

But I still get complaints from our customers about spam that gets through. Just the other day a crapload got through because it was relatively subdued spam (no webbugs, NO LINE OF YELLING, etc); unfortunately, it also advertised pictures of young boys having sex. It's hard to explain why it's very, very hard to filter for this sort of thing, especially when I'm going through the talk for the nth time this week. (I need a good analogy that non-geeks can understand; I'm still looking.)

The good folks at DeerSoft have a version of SpamAssassin for Outlook, and are promising one for OE Real Soon Now. But I would loooooooooooooooooooooooove a good spam program -- this or SA or something else -- that I could point our customers to. Download, double-click, say yes, and bam it's installed. I can figure out how to install this on a Unix box; I could probably, eventually figure out how to do it on a Windows box; there's no way the customers could do it.

Or am I missing good, free spam filtering for Windows? Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Slightly OT: There has got to be a huge market for setting up spam filtering for small businesses. My idea: Tell 'em that if they provide the box -- an old Pentium or 486 will do -- I'll set up spam filtering and a firewall on it, set up some maintenance tools (whitelist this, firewall that). They get great mail service, I get $x00.

Vipul's Razor is the protocol that Cloudmark uses.

SpamAssassin is an implementation using perl that might also be useful. I believe this has more to it than just the Razor checking (it checks blacklists and headers etc.) - I have heard of some false-positives using it though, (but perhaps it just wasn't configured correctly.)

Deersoft have a Windows product based on SpamAssassin.

I use Win2K Pro and get my mail from a POP3 server with Opera's email client. I'm not willing to downgrade to Outhouse, which both cloudmark's SpamNet and Deersoft's SpamAssassin Pro require. Any suggestions for a general POP3 solution for the Win32 platform?

Their intergration of Spam Assassin into an Outlook component is great.

I use it at home and even bought licenses fr the office as well.

The software is well worth the money.

If you use Outlook, and you like SpamAssassin, then you can use SpamAssassin Pro from Deersoft instead of SpamNet -- seems to work much better for most people in terms of false positive/false negative rates.

If you're friends/family are using Outlook, there is a Spamassassin plugin now available for windows. $30