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E-mail Tax As Way Of Preventing Spam
scubacuda writes "This FT article criticizes current attempts to regulate spam. Re: Lessig's bounty-on-spammer proposal: 'This is a terrible idea that will make millionaires of two classes of people: reprobates who illegally maraud through others' hard drives; and those who have built their expertise about spam by peddling it, 'He considers the recent FTC spam conference "barking up the wrong tree," and thinks that the simplest way to regulate spam is through a tax: 'This requires smashing some myths....But, very soon, the Internet should turn into a penny post, with a levy of 1 cent per letter. This would cost the average e-mailer about $10 a year. Small companies would pay bills in the hundreds of dollars; very large ones in the thousands. And spammers would be driven to honest employment. The tax could be made progressive by exempting, say, those who sent fewer than 5,000 letters a year. The proceeds could go to maintain and expand bandwidth.'"
However, if ISPs are the ones paying for bandwidth... how would a "tax" help, per se? Should ISPs charge for email? And, if so, won't spammers overseas still get away with things? (Actually, with taxes, they do too.)
Urban legend comes to life. Wasn't this a myth passed along (via spam of course) years ago. Except I think it claimed the USPS was responsible for the tax.
http://saveie6.com/
I think this is a good idea. I would gladly pay tax on email to stop me spending all of my money on penis enlargements!
thats a really good idea :-/
what about mailing lists? i'm on several, and its not uncommon for me to get several hundred emails per day...
why are there so many fools in the world...
[sigh]
Ok, so maybe people signing up to a list would have to pay for the messages they receive... but now we're basically talking micropayments!
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
If you drive a car-car I'll tax the street
If you try to sit-sit I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk I'll tax your feet
Tax man
Honestly, folks, this is not an original attempt at problem solving here. This is the kind of thing that ordinary ninnies in the U.S. legislature think up.
Some of us still run mailing lists to connect a group of friends- who pays then? It is a perfectly legitimate use... but it seems scary if I'm would have to register my mailing list to get an 'exemption'
I think the biggest failing in this is that to tax email would require a massive change to the email infrastructure- just send all email through your government approved relay. Sure- they won't look at it... putting this on top of SMTP- I don't think it would work- what would be the incentive to use it (other than possibly spam free email)?
I run ampfea.org. We have been an open, free, highly communicative community for the last 6 years, surviving solely on contributions (donations) made by members to keep our services alive. We've done okay with it, but it hasn't been easy at times.
Now, adding *tax* to our e-mail (most of our forums are based on mailing list traffic) would completely cut down on the ability for members to communicate freely. Tax on e-mail is a *BAD* idea.
There are plenty of effective ways to deal with the SPAM problem. Tax is not one of them. Tax is never a solution to any problem.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I probably sound like a broken record, but a plan like this one closes the door on lots of legitimate uses of email.
Thousands of email lists such as those hosted on Sourceforge would be shut down by a plan like this one, as well as killing lists like the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which sends millions of messages a year.
Also gone would be the days of the open mailing list, where people can send a message to the list without being subscribed, as is common in the open source world.
In short, this proposal guarantees that the only people able to use legitimate email lists will be large companies with the budget to spam. I got an unsolicited email from Wachovia this morning, apparently since I had a First Union account, they turned on all the marketing "spam me" options in my profile when the two merged.
I don't see how this tax will deter these semi-legitimate corporate spammers.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
First off, how the fsck do they intend to even enforce something like that? I can setup an e-mail server on a *nix box in 5 minutes. (Literally, I know I've done it). How do you account for how many e-mails a user sent?
Secondly, what about businesses? We probably send at least a few hundred (non-spam) e-mails a day out to the public Internet where I work, we'd get hit pretty hard.
And lastly, this is just an other tax, another form of revenue generation. We don't NEED more taxes. I'm sick to death of the government sticking out its greedy little hand. Go AWAY! I already pay tax on everything I buy, every drop of gas I put in my car, every cigarette I smoke, every drop of alcohol I consume, and every dollar I make. I pay property taxes, and I pay a form of tax when I go to the state parks to camp. I pay a tax to license the car I drive, and to just have the privelege of being able to drive.
No, I'm sick of it. Put your greedy little hand back in your pocket and go away!
My journal has hot
this taxation neglects the issues of virii that install smpt servers on John Q. Average's computer trhu which spam gets sent. Kinda hard to tax.
,if such a bill passes, I can imagine tons of new virii popping up that use VB to send daisy chaned spam from one client to another.
Additionally
Whitelists are the way to go for me.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The problem to begin with is that spammers falsify their headers. Therefore under this plan, innocent people would get stuck with a tax bill. If there was a simple automatic process to trace the origin of spam to its source, then we could do that to begin with and simply block the true sender.
In other words, in order to properly implement a tax, we'd have to have already solved the spam problem, which would make the tax superfluous.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Taxation is only rational when the government actually provides a service. I realise that at the end of the posting, it said that revenues would go towards increasing bandwidth (like anybody believes that), but right now there are thousands of kilometers of dark fibre -- bandwidth ain't the issue.
To put forward idea that we pay taxes on e-mail is to display your ignorance of how e-mail works. If I set up an e-mail server at my own expense, and send an e-mail through it to another server, set up at the recipients own expense, I fail to see where the government's services come into it. After running a few traceroutes to my most common e-mail destinations, all the hops belonged to corporations, not the government.
And those are just the techno-political reasons why taxes don't make sense. What about internation e-mails. I live/work in Canada, but a lot of our business is international (States, UK, etc).
I also don't think that the spam-killers-for-hire is a good idea either (difficult to regulate, and a good chance of a lot of innocent bystanders getting hurt.)
I personally like signed e-mails, and much stiffer penalties for spammers. This may seem like a soft solution, but laws end up being the last recourse. As many on Slashdot jump at pointing out, technological barriers are easily overcome, especially by a large group of determined people.
The idea that one could tax email per letter (not per bandwidth) is inane at best. It means that people will actually stop sending smaller email, the kind that really improves the ability to quickly communicate and respond to communications, and beyond that an effort will be made to economize on a business scale, by getting the most value for your 1 cent (video clips being emailed).
As a second issue, how does the government tax foreign entities for email? And who do you tax, when spam is notoriously made difficult to trace?
And beyond that, I can imagine the dozens, if not thousands, of hackers, just waiting to have this sort of incentive to develop a better SMTP, one that solves many of the problems and loopholes that SMTP currently causes.
Also the article suggests that the federal government should be creating an Federal sales tax on internet purchases. Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought I already paid state tax. Atleast I do with any company that is doing business properly. This doesn't seem different than the old style catalog sales, where you order something out of state to avoid tax. I know Apple charges state tax in NY.
Really for a publication called the financial times, this is not a very financially sensible or reality based article. it seems to be written by someone whose only experience in the internet is reading about it.
Income tax was originally outlawed in the U.S. It was deemed necessary at some point, but only the extremely wealthy had to pay so it was accepted. Now look where we are. Yes, it may start out at one cent per e-mail (or even a fraction of a cent per e-mail), but what happens if that's "not effective enough" or "costs of bandwidth go up"?
I have no
Spam is a natural result of an unregulated network. The reason the Internet is so interesting and creative is because it's unregulated. You have to take the rough with the smooth. Sure, get angry at the spammers, prosecute them even. But don't think about restricting freedoms just because it's convenient to do so: that's what DMCA is about, and the Patriot act, and all the dozens of other stupid "anti-terrorist" laws that countries around the world are implementing right now.
Give me freedom, or give me death. I'll take the spam.
Why should 99% of the people have to pay because 1% are fucking it up for everyone else?
All an email tax gets you... IS SPAM.
Look at the direct mailers filling the land fills with credit card offers and other equally unneed things.
Their business model INCLUDES the mailing cost cost (less than what you can pay) and the print costs. The USPS helps them to get in business.
Last I heard 80% of all mailings was junk mail.
Now a tax to send email... The ISP gets a cut, so they can increase network bandwidth. We pay as users to increase network bandwidth. They SPAMERS would pay too, it is included in their costs.
So what do you get... The same model as the USPS.
Now that shows why a price per email is not going to stop anything.
Isn't part of the point of email that it might want to be anonymous? Do you really want the government having records of each and every email you've sent so that they can collect taxes on it?
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The spam problem currently exists mainly because we can't track down spammers. Until you solve that, implementing an e-mail tax will never get off the ground.
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What about open relays? Of course its stupid and irresponsible to have one, but now you could now find yourself being taxed thousands of dollars for doing so?
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What about an worm/trojan sending out bulk e-mail? Punishing the victim is a great idea.
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How do you deal with mail across national boundaries? I wonder if he has thought about the world about the USA.
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What about mailing lists? How do you propose to tax them? They take up more bandwidth than a single e-mail but less than n individual emails. Defining all these would lead to such a messy overregulated internet that it will lose all trace of what it was like formerly.
This guy has no idea of the technicalities of the internet.Look at this statement:
Mythic, eh? Has this troll heard of usenet? This is just an anti-libertarian rant/flame from some disgruntled control freak. Ignore it and move on.I guess with presidential politics already starting it was inevitable that people would start putting forward ideas to combat spam in the political arena. My first question on this is why would I pay the government anything to send email, since neither state nor federal agencies have anything to do how I process email. They don't provide bandwidth, servers, or even oversight. The author's suggestion that this money could be used to "The proceeds could go to maintain and expand bandwidth." is patently ridiculous since the government doesn't provide bandwidth, private companies do. The next issue is just how would you even implment this? Most of the spam that our servers process comes from places that US can't tax, and I imagine that if this was implemented, then the remaining spam would quickly move to places that aren't known for cooperating with US courts & extradition. There is a reason that Sharman Networks (the folks who own Kazaa) are incorporated
in Vanuatu
The only thing that we can do that isn't a band aid or a un-enforcable law is look at how to rewrite the SMTP protocol, right now it is far too easy (by design) to send email from anywhere to anywhere without any accountability. We need a system that allows for servers to positively identified (something similar to a secure cert, not that I want to hand more money to Verisign but...) Then its up to the individual admin to decide what to do with email from a un-certified server; accept it, rate limit it, tag it, or deny it. Now no one _wants_ to rewrite all of the MTA's in the world, but at least this gives a way for non-compliant servers to get mail processed until everyone has gotten their's updated.
My largest fear from this type of proposal comes from the potentially vague definition of "email" that might be created. What is email, exactly? Are we talking about only SMTP? If so, what about "Instant Messenger" spam? Maybe we should classify instant message protocols as email, too. What about USENET? Should we classify NNTP as email, as well? What about SMS spam? What about the "next big thing", whatever it turns out to be? Perhaps we should have taxes based on IP packets sen1! That would be about as sane... yeesh!
Think I'm making this up? I had one customer who was ranting to me about their LAN-based "email" not working (a year ago, mind you). Upon closer inspection, I found their "email system" to be "WinPopUp" running on each PC that they'd use to send pop-up messages to each other. That was their "email". Think of your own relationships-- you know at least one person who calls instant messenger systems "email" (much like those novices who confuse RAM and hard disk space and call them both "memory").
The Internet works because we all agree to abide by the same standards, and agree that ICANN is the authority for naming / numbering. This spirit of cooperation works because we all benefit-- not because some government legislated it so. If some idiotic "email tax" does get legislated in the U.S., we run the risk of making ourselves into "second class" Internet citizens, and creating the "United States Internet" and the "rest of the world's Internet".
Spam is a social problem being "enabled" by technology. It cannot be legislated away, because it breeds on human nature: the desire to have large returns from little work. Real answers are things like ubiquitous public-key infrastructure, signed email, reputation "credits" (or "karma", if you like), and accountability. The decentralized "web of trust" model of PGP combined with the "reputation credit" model of eBay is what I'm talking about. Imagine an email client program that categorizes incoming mail based on the "cred" accumulated by the sender in a decentralized, non-government controlled "reputation tracking" system.
Taxes and laws aren't going to solve the problem. They're going to stifle the real power the Internet has-- bringing people together and enhancing communication. Worse-- they risk making an "island" of any country who would enact such idiotic legislation.
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
Every problem that we have that revolves around a man-made technology is fixable with a man made technology. We don't need taxes, we need to fix the core of the email system.
"The simplest way to regulate spam is through a tax."
Perhaps this is true, but the simplest way is almost NEVER the best way. How are you going to define the differences between email and every other electronic message passing? Will the tax suddenly apply to IM's? then web pages? then internet phone calls? What happens 20 years from now when the technology is different? Will the tax stop? Hell no! Most likeley there will be a new tax code buried in every little packet so that the government can get even more money for nothing.
Why should the burden of the "fix" for this problem be shouldered mostly by the people that it is trying to "protect"? I don't want to pay my government for the privelage of doing something that was previously free. That does not solve anything! I want the people sending spam to pay ME!
This tax might sound innocent on its surface, but it only takes one little thing like this to make it seem acceptable to throw a tax on every digital transaction.
To all you dopes that think this is a good idea, think about the big picture. This point in time is not static. Technology is changing constantly. Spam will die when the time is right. For now we can just deal with it with the methods available to us. Do not let the government see the Internet as the latest frontier where they can profit by "saving us from ourselves".
Looks like the spammers are winning their guerrilla war, then. We're suggesting responding with disproportionate force in a way that puts the main burden on noncombatants -- always the sign you're about to lose something like this.
I mean, we'd be throwing a huge burden on a system that basically works in order to go after abusers who've already shown they're not going to give up in an arms race for their survival. Good thinking. It's not like spammers would try to, say, abuse other people's servers to send messages without an attributable (read: taxable) source on them. No way. They wouldn't think of that one, no precedent for that... Or were we creating a big new policing division of the U.S. Postal service to defend e-mail servers?
Seriously, how wrongheaded is this? Extremely. It'd be impossible to administer and track without seriously degrading the flexibility and increasing the cost of e-mail systems we have right now on the cheap. How many times has your address changed? Who's tracking your tax bill across all those? Etc. etc. etc. Classic blindered thinking -- a pet idea we should pat on the head and move past. (Exactly how does this tax get collected across borders? Person hasn't addressed the international nature of the internet. Person suggests a "progressive" version, flying in the face of 20-some years of U.S. taxation trends. And so on.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
IMHO, a better idea, compared to imposing taxes on email, would be to create a new infrastructure for exchanging of "email", where things like forged headers, open relays and spammers would be a thing of the past. What I'm thinking of is essentially a new TCP port, a new service, a new daemon, designed from scratch, one that takes all the concerns of today, does some forecasting for the future, and makes us forget about spam for a few years. Something that uses certificates from a few select (trusted) authorities to verify connecting server's identity (kinda like caller-ID, you only answer the calls you want to allow) -- SSL is an accepted way for us to verify the identity of the website we're trying to connect to, why couldn't it be a way to verify the identity of the server trying to connect to us? And throw in some encryption into the mix so that the traffic can't be \easily\ snooped. Rogue servers would quickly get their act together if they started to have mail queue up because their certs were expired / bad etc.
I think that trying to get an old medium to conform to today's demands might be more expensive (taxes or no taxes) than to simply coming up with a new one. A well-designed (and I don't claim to have one) solution would take less time to implement and I think would be easier to manage.
I understand that SSL, encryption and such would not be music to Dept. of Homeland Security's ears, that they would much rather leave the burden and cost on us, but there would be some upsides from their vantage point, too -- there would be less traffic for them to sift through (though it would be more intensive to process it), and I'm sure they'd get their back-door tentacles into the architecture somehow.
I won't even get into arguments like "how do you tax someone who's out of your jurisdiction", or "how do you get thousands of sysadmins try to add SSL to sendmail/qmail/pick-your-MTA without breaking backward-compatibility" etc. Just like gopher and ftp have/are becoming things of the past, I think SMTP should too.
Have EVDO, will travel.
Spammers just can't afford to sign their mails - with any signature.
Spam is one email being sent out a million times. Identical copies of messages flood a network. (If you don't believe this, I'll show you a spam I recently received which had over a thousand entries in the CC field. The spammer accidentally CCd instead of BCCd.)
If you're sending a million copies of one message, you only need one PGP signature. It becomes a fixed one-time fee per different email you send out, not a per-message CPU tax.
Now that viruses will make people unlucky to get caught with them pay alot =(
Also, that this tax thing may trigger to make more viruses to flood out mails from innocent computers.
I was once for the idea, but after a thought, no.
Income tax was originally outlawed in the U.S. It was deemed necessary at some point, but only the extremely wealthy had to pay so it was accepted. Now look where we are.
:)
That's okay, the democrats say only the rich pay income taxes or benefit from tax cuts, so you're OBVIOUSLY rich... =)
I assume you've written your representative and asked them to support HR25, the Fair Tax Bill of 2003?
And that you vote Libertarian?
In addition, spammers would try to workaround those taxes, and possibly succeed, just like they forge the headers of spam they send today. As a result, legimate users would pay the tax and spammers would send the spam for free. Adding some heavy-weight bureaucracy to the problem (tax system) isn't the solution.
The idea in A Bounty on Spammers article seems like a one possible way to go. It's not perfect because it doesn't get rid of the wasted bandwidth immediatly as it doesn't outlaw spam, only spam that isn't clearly marked as spam. I'm not entirely sure about the $10000 bounty the article suggests. I think it should be proportional to the number of spams sent -- say, $5 per spam sent. And make that $50 per spam sent if the spammer tried to forge headers! It would really hurt to send one million spams with forged headers unlike today.
Once we have [ADV:] in every spam we get, we can modify SMTP servers to return "555 Advertisements not allowed" if one tries to send a spam and save some wasted bandwidth.
Alternatively, once we get micropayments work, we can allow spammers to send spam that transfers some money to the reader once he reads the spam. Because sending spam doesn't cost anything, the spammer could choose to pay some small amount of money to get the receiver to read the spam.
Perhaps some poor guy could make a living reading spam?_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
But in real life it is not going to work.
1. Whos job will it be to monitor all the e-mail traffic. The sender or the reciever.
2. Spammers use Open Relays or fine vulnerabilities in the persons system (thus able to send 1 message to a hundred users) or sending data threw a non smtp protocol. Thus avoiding the tax or minimizing it $.01 for a million messages. and the poor victim besides getting blacklisted has to pay $10,000 in taxes.
3. When being sent threw a foreign site. How do you collect taxes from them?
4. How do you enforce this?
It seems like a good idea in the perfect world but it is not. All this will end up doing is putting extra expense on the honest business man and individual. But most spammers are far from honest and would end up doing what they have been doing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Lots of good points have already been made, so I won't rehash them (and I'm only looking at +5 already!) but here's a good article on why micropayments will never, ever, ever, ever [emphasis mine] work by Clay Shirky.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
This is how some of the greatest blunders in the world get created, when people instinctively react without thoroughly analyzing a problem and the pros and cons of each potential solution.
What in the world does the government have to do with bits being sent from one computer to another, and why should the government automatically get money for it without my consent? What if the machines were all within an intranet wholly owned by me? Of course the risk of spam would be much less, but try to see the point because some will unfairly (and very unreasonably) be taxed. A blanket process like that would, in the long run, only be of benefit to one person - Uncle Sam. Not the consumer.
I also highly doubt that these taxes can possibly be collected while also maintaining the anonymity of sender and receiver.
And rather than pay Uncle Sam indefinitely each time I send an e-mail, I would much rather invest that money in anti-spam software. That seems to make much more sense to me.
So you know, the original income tax was first instituted to help fund the civil war, at 1/2% tax. It was later repealed, as it was found unconstitutional in the courts for the government to tax income.
But congress tried again in 1913, and was a 1% tax on the top 1% wage earners (in 1913, those that earned $3k to $20k per year).
Fast forward to today, and take a look at how far we've let the government tax our earnings... today, the top 1% wage earners pay 38.6% of their salary in taxes, accounting for ~ 29% of the total (top 5% wage earners paid 50% of all taxes in 1999)
Now we have people saying, "I don't mind paying $0.01 for my emails"... What restraint has the government ever shown that next year it'll be $0.02, then $0.05 (who'll miss a nickle?), a dime... And where the hell will all this money go? into improving the internet infrastructure? Nooo, that's a private business. The money and accountability will disappear, probably into Medicare, Social Security, and all the other social programs that government isn't supposed to be in.
Government control is not a road we want to walk down folks. Yes, control of communications through taxation. I can't understand why the crowd complains when little things are being taken away, and the same people just turn around and hand the big ones over willingly.
I'm going to guess that you're an american. Americans tend to have this blind spot that extends from their borders and works outward. Most of them tend to ignore (and be ignorant of)the rest of the world. For example, in the movie Outbreak a plague is sweeping across the States. There is a scene where they extrapolate the spread of the disease. Curiously, it never crosses the borders.
The idea of taxing email, or having a government sender verification site, contains the assumtion that the internet is somehow contained in a single country. When a Pakistani is sending an email to a Turk, who's government website is the Turk supposed to check? What is the tax to be paid in? What happens with a country that decides that it will not comply, how do you check the key?
Spam is an international problem. It cannot be fixed by a national solution. Legislation will not work, because there will always be countries which do not comply. If there is going to be a solution to spam, it is going to be a technical solution, not a legal one.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I'll reply to this one, since it seems the most intelligent :) (Note that I'm not disagreeing in any real sense)
Paved transportation infrastructure should be paid for in gasoline and other transportation related taxes
It is. Much in the same way that bridge tolls go mainly towards their mainteinance (or at least it's supposed to). Last I heard, the Clinton administration raised the Gasoline tax here to an all-time high of 18.4 cents per gallon. (I am not sure if the current administration raised it since, but you can pretty much guess that it hasn't gone down!)
Now, whether or not that tax goes to maintaining roads and other traffic infastructures is a good point. It should, but probably doesn't.
Three decades of declining education proves that the more money you throw at it, the worse it gets
I wouldn't be so quick to make such a direct correlation, but the overall sentament is true. Personally, I feel the decline of the education system is due to the population growing faster than the supply of qualified teachers. Money is certaintly one thing that would be required to fix this, but not the only thing.
I could rant about stupid teachers for pages, but to sum it up in a single analogy: I work as an engineering consultant (designing plumbing and HVAC for the architects)... a very large portion of our work has been school expansions and renovations, which inevitably requiers visiting the schools to record existing conditions.
When declaring that we're from the engineer's office (when checking in at the administration desk, or when someone asks what we're doing), it's not uncommon to hear someone make comment about what trains have to do with the work that was going on. (Try not to think about that too hard, it hurts after awhile)
Basically, I feel the problem with the education system is more related to lack of qualified teachers than it is with misappropriation/lack/excess of funds. Bad teachers make for poorly educated students, and poorly educated students grow up to (sometimes) be bad teachers.
Public libraries? Same thing. In fact, libraries would be better off if they weren't free.
See, that's soemthing I don't necessarily agree with. The whole point is that information is supposed to be available to anyone, not just those who can afford it (Note that I didn't use the word "free", clearly not all information can really be free, nor should be). Although the internet has the potential to draw a lot of interest away from physical libraries, it's never going to replace them.
Plus, if a library "goes out of business" jsut because there's not enough interest, what about future generations? It's not like a video store or pizza shop, which are a dime a dozen (around here at least) and can come and go overnight. A library is a big invenstment, and once it's gone it's very likely to stay gone.
There are other things that simply deserve to die - like the National Endowment for the Arts.
Again, I'm not sure I'd agree with such a generalization. I think we agree that the arts are an important part of society, and that it's worth preserving. Although I admit I'm not comfortable with the wholesale subsidizing of our culture just because it won't stay afloat on it's own, I do support tax money going towards it.
I don't think many people would complain about their taxes if they really got the feeling that they were getting something for their money. (Clearly, tax money is not being handled wisely, and that's a big problem.)
To borrow a phrase from you: the more money you throw at it (more taxes), the worse it gets (poor handling of tax revenue). New taxes solve nothing in the long run.
=Smidge=
Imagine what would happen if the most popular mail server applications (i.e. Sendmail, Postfix, Exchange, Groupwise, etc) simply all agreed to implement a throttle control into their code. Allow it to be configurable, where something like an email list can send as much as it needs (trusted accounts), but untrusted accounts are limited to maybe 100 or 200 emails an hour. Spammers work by sending emails in the thousands or millions, as fast as they can. Ignore the from: header since it can be forged ... track them by IP address. It would be very hard for someone to come up with a new IP address every couple hundred emails and re-establish the connection to the server from a time perspective.
I think eventually the spammers would have nowhere else to go; if a version of sendmail came out with this feature, I would install it in a second, even though I'm not an open relay. Legitimate users cause these problems too.
I would even go so far as to say the ISP's need to take some action here, if it's really such a problem for their precious bandwidth. Monitor the SMTP volume coming through their network - set limits. Test their client systems periodically for open relays, block or severely limit the ones who do not comply after giving them time to work it out. A lot of admins, sadly, simply do not know better, or are very lazy until prodded. Tell them their server won't pass traffic until the relay is closed and watch them comply real quick. If it's a signed user agreement, they can't do much about it.
I require this of my Co-Lo customers; if they have a server, I *require* them to keep it patched, email relays closed, etc. I do check from time to time, and it's in their agreement with me that I reserve the right to disable any access to their server I deem necessary to preserve the integrity of the rest of the network. Not a single one has complained about that, and in fact all were pleasantly surprised to see a provider take such a pro-active approach to service integrity. Is it more overhead for me? I have found that it may seem like it initially, however by enforcing this it is actually less work than dealing with constant cleanup. Think about it. It's a shift in the paradigm of "customer can do no wrong", to "customer sometimes just needs to be shown the way".
Just adding a throttle control to email servers... That's all it would take. Just getting providers to tell their customers to stop causing the problems, is all it would take. Doesn't this seem like a hell of a lot less work than taxing email or any of the other mess of solutions presented?