[treadair]

One sure way to get rid of spam would be to destroy the business model of the people who pay spammers to send their messages. Those customers rely on a response rate of about 1/2 of 1 percent. If they suddenly started getting a response rate of 20 percent, the vast majority of which were fake orders, then it would quickly become uneconomical for them to sort through the orders to find the good ones. And if there was no money in it for them then they'd stop giving money to the spammers, who'd then have no reason to continue sending out spam.

All we'd need to do to make this work is pass a law that lets us create a company that could legally submit false orders (to prevent charges of fraud). This company would be run by a consortium of major companies who'd find it in their own best interests to volunteer the personnel we need to staff it (just to make sure their own emails aren't accidentally targeted as spam). The staffers would either manually or programatically respond to spam with fake orders. Banks could even provide blocks of credit card numbers to help make the orders pass inspection (all charges against the orders would be refused).



Reward: None required.

[Steve]

The problem lies somewhere else - if it was easy to distinguish spammers from non-spammers, and lawmakers were truely willing to do something against spam, they would simply put the spammers in jail or let them pay heavy fines (eventually, this will happen, or the internet will break). The problem however is that it's not as easy as it seems to tag spammers (without getting false positives) and lawmakers are still not aware of the true scope of the problem.

[treadair]

It shouldn't be too hard to identify the spammers. All you'd need to do is create several email addresses, make them known on the net, and then compare incomming emails to them. Since none of these addresses are for real people, whatever gets sent to them is spam.

[Steve]

It shouldn't be too hard to identify the spammers. All you'd need to do is create several email addresses, make them known on the net, and then compare incomming emails to them. Since none of these addresses are for real people, whatever gets sent to them is spam.

Why aren't they for real people if they are known on the net?

[treadair]

One of the first duties of this newly formed company would be to create false email identities to attract the spammers. A honeypot of sorts.

[Steve]

What would make the false identities attractive to spammers only?

[treadair]

Who else besides spammers would be sending emails to the false identities? All of the emails coming to them would be unsolicited and therefore spam. If there were some acceptable exceptions then the volunteers staffing the company could set them aside and not send any fake orders to them.