Will certified e-mail stop spam? (was: unsubscribing... etc)

[Peter]

On Thu, 13 Apr 2006 wattst-dxuVLtCph9gsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org wrote:

>> Effectively there would be a computer mismanagement charge for people
>> who do not secure their machines and leave them open to attack,
>> amounting to $10 or more per month per machine (assuming 10,000 emails
>> returned as spam at 1 cent each per month). This would prod 'innocent
>> ignorers' into action. Of course it would do nothing for real spammers,
>> but they would have to start buying serious bandwidth since zombies
>> should start being scarce after a while.
>>
>> $0.01
>> Peter
>
> Let me start by saying that I haven't been actively following this thread so I
> may be very misinformed, but you're last paragraph really struct a chord with
> me, particularly this sentence: "This would prod 'innocent ignorers' into
> action."  Now, I don't know if you are talking about charging business servers,
> who should be taking appropriate action to ensure they're not part of the
> problem or actual home users (Mom and Pop), but I'm under the impression that
> it is the latter.  THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN.  I can just imagine the outrage of
> people who are already frustrated by computers having to pay an additional
> charge to be on the internet when, I think, a lot of these people are on the
> internet only because they feel they have to be.  They are already upset about
> paying for something they don't fully understand.

They will pay for it exactly the way they pay for 'author rights' when 
buying media intended for backing up computers and exactly how they pay 
for gas taxes which are unexplainably high etc.

I do not have a plan but I have a pretty good spam filter and I have the 
same email address since at least 1996, and published on my website too 
(since then). So I know exactly how much spam increased or decreased in 
the last ten years. We are at the point where spam is mandatory to 
justify ISP bandwidth, whereas email is optional.

As far as I am concerned, this could go on forever. However, since it's 
legal to send spam and it costs nothing, I think that it should be every 
network user's patriotic duty to send at least 10,000 random emails per 
month, to random addresses or even unknown people, with wishes of good 
health, and politics, and cookie recipes. I would even offer to 
write such a program, which would send fortune cookies and sell 
nothing whatsoever, to random addresses. Let's see who is going to whine 
about bandwidth *then*.

Peter
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