Frankly, I see no other solution to this problem in the long run except for postage, which means it's probably time to start figuring out, in earnest, how to make it all work. Whoever becomes the lowest cost producer of this kind of software stands to make a whole *bunch* of money.
We still need to work out how to fit mailing lists fit into this without eliminating them entirely. Chargebacks to the subscribers? If this list will work in a proposed plan, I think all the others probably would as well.. :-)
I personally see hashcash as the ideal way to solve this problem, and in Adam Back`s analysis of the hashcash solution he mentions mailing lists and suggest that filtering software have an explicit "filter in" command, so you could eliminate any mail coming from the list from needing to have cash attached. Of course the spammers could then just spam mailing lists, but that it a much smaller problem than the current random UCE problem. Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"