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Reverse Firewalls As An Anti-Spam Tool
An anonymous reader writes "VeriSign's principal scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker believes one answer to stopping spammers and even crackers is by using reverse firewalls. He says reverse firewalls should be embedded in every cable modem and wireless access point for home users. "A traditional firewall is designed to stop attacks from the outside coming in; a reverse firewall stops an attack going out," Hallam-Baker said. Apparently, a reverse firewall would reduce the value of recruiting your home PC as a member of a botnet because "normal users have no need to send out floods of e-mail, which reverse firewalls can stop, but they do allow a normal flow of e-mail. ""
Enhanced SMTP better known as ESMTP is not hypothetical. It's out there, it works, mail clients know about it. It's optional and most ISP's I've used don't have strong authentication. They could, but choose not to. Search Google for Ehanced SMTP or you'll find an ESMTP mail server.
It seems your proposing the same argument the article does. Basically security needs to be enabled by default. The internet is no longer a place where you can trust. They are suggesting a hardware fix, your suggesting software.
Either way it will most likely require some pretty big players like AOL or Microsoft to implement it before it would achieve critical mass. Designing a different way of doing things isn't hard, it's getting everyone else to agree to it and use it.
AOL started implementing SPF to stop spam. If AOL/MSN/Yahoo all decide to stop accepting mail that doesn't come form SPF using sites, adoption should happen in about a fortnight.