Impoverish a Spammer Today

esj at harvee writes "Recently the Camram project released its latest version of a hybrid sender-pays anti-spam system. The project has proven that sender-pays works and has demonstrated how to make it work with existing e-mail systems. Camram has developed hybrid sender-pays techniques that scale down to the desktop and up to the enterprise. It's a completely decentralized system that can put spam-fighting power in the hands of individuals. It gives you control of not only the current generation of spam, but also any future commercial spam -- why replace Viagra ads from a scam artist with Viagra ads from Pfizer?"

Comments

When do I get a shock-the-spammer protcol?

[gevmage]

An interesting concept. Stamping of the mail is computationally intensive, verifying it isn't. I think that it's impressive for something that's calling itself an 0.3 version.

This could really change the way e-mail is distributed.

One Idea

[th1ckasabr1ck]

One thing they should look towards doing is maybe circumventing the payment if you are sending to someone else in the same domain. Then businesses wouldn't have to pay for all internal e-mail.

Or maybe businesses should find a new way to communicate internally?

Re:The problem is...

[the_mad_poster]

Ah, but the spammers aren't and won't pay for their servers. They will continue to hijack other peoples machines through worms and trojans and just eat up the CPU time of the zombie machines.

sender pays stamping is a decent solution to spam, but it's not any solution to stupid lusers.

The solution to the luser problem is:

• Education for the naive luser.
• Network quarantine for the lazy luser
• Criminal (or civil) penalties for the malicious luser.

People need to stop objecting to spam solutions based on the existance of other problems. Sender pays stamping doesn't stop viruses and trojans because it's not supposed to, other systems like firewalls, patches, and anti virus tools are supposed to. Rather than complaining that spam solutions don't solve the malware problem, we ought to be educating people on how to use these things and working on improving them.