Screaming Penguin

Yeah, thousands of people have tried thousands of things, but a new effort is underway that may once and for all stop spam. A group of experts from several technical and email related fields is joining forces to define what spam is and come up with a means to stop it that will likely involve a relationship between sender and receiver. Also they have suggested possible smaller steps like requiring valid return-path, and sender, etc (mechanisms to check the authenticity of email addresses and not allow spoofed or outright false addresses to be used). I gotta say, all of this sounds like a good idea, at least to start a SERIOUS dialog about it, but Bayesian filtering works pretty darn well right now. Using SpamAssassin with the built in rules and the "learn" tools (it can learn from your email what is and is not spam to you) I achieve a near perfectly spam free inbox (NEVER have I had a "false positive" which I did get using any DNS blacklist technique, and only 1 or 2 actual spam messages out of 100 a day get through). However, the admitted issue with this type of filtering is that it still consumes bandwidth, machine resources and TIME. Its still BS that I HAVE to have my email server scan for spam and its a waste of my money. A better, REAL, solution that would flat put spammers out of business would be ideal. For more see the linked BBC article.   Spam to be canned?: BBC