None of those things work. Most spammers don't give a shit if you don't receive email. I can attest to this by the slew of spam going to hostmaster, webmaster, and the like on many networks. What they're really selling is "ten million addresses" and spam software. Even if 9 million of those are bullshit, they couldn't care less. The more things with "@" signs in'em the more money they make off clueless businesses. ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :NSA got $20Bill/year|Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :their failures, we |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------ On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Marcel Popescu wrote:

From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>

...

Solution is obvious and has been known for a long time Integrate payment with email. If anyone not on your approved list wants to send you mail, they have to pay you x, where x is a trivial sum, say a cent or two.

Spammers wind up sending huge amounts of mail to unmonitored mailboxes, which will make spamming unprofitable.

There is also Wei Dai's idea of b-money, I think, which requires every incoming mail to solve a problem about hashes. This could be included in the SMTP protocol, so that the server can generate the challenge dinamically (to prevent replays). This would limit the amount of spam without requiring any "real" money.

Mark