Spam: Taxes are always chilling...

Spam sucks, and believe me due to the things I have to deal with lately it's a problem that I don't take lightly. But thoughts this and this are a joke now-adays, as very, very few spammers are actually coming from where they say they're coming from.

Think about it this way:

If you get a piece of spam from lmnop@yahoo.com... it is not coming from yahoo, they've spoofed the headers. When you bounce it, you are faking an email from your host server to host that sent the message... but when they've faked the headers your bounced message hits yahoo, they see no user exists, and bounce it back to your ISP's server.

Something like 99.5% of spam uses forged headers now, simply because US and other countries ISP's apply a ton of pressure on any ISP down the chain to yank accounts for anyone found to be spamming. It's just more cost-effective for them to use out of country ISP's to funnel it all out already... You can blacklist and stop spam if you can know where it is coming from- but since they're forging headers you're just SOL.

There's a reason why baysean filtering is the most effective client and server side way to stop spam, but it's mostly useful on the client-side as it really needs some training. There are all sorts of technical ideas out there to stop spam completely, but the ones that would work are all based on being able to really tell where spam is coming from, or to at least have a way to know that mail coming to you should be coming to you.

None of have been implimented because they all require additions to RFC, a new spec, and things are just too entrenched... it would take half a dozen years for there to really be any effect and even then it could have a chilling effect on the net...

But that's beside the point- which is that if you could get people to overnight all upgrade and use a new spec for email, the problem would be pretty much solved.

If you actually taxed email, you'd have to do the same thing anyways- there's just no workable solution that would work without a new spec and infrastructure. If you didn't, nothing would change- spammers would still use forged headers to get their spam out from foreign hosts...

So, we have the problem that spam can't really be stopped without major technological changes (which haven't happened for a reason so far), but if they could be implimented would make spam a thing of the past. Yet, in order to tax email, you would have to impliment major technological changes to the net infrastructure...

Just kinda silly, IMHO. Chicken and egg... except that tax doesn't have to be there, and it won't have any consequence beyond chilling the parts that make the net so great. There'd be no mailing lists, no listervs, you'd pay the tax over and over: you don't think your ISP wouldn't pass on its additional costs on tech-support emails to you, or the costs for email support for any product you buy wouldn't be passed on?