Spam sucks and everyone’s got an idea on how to end it. I’m not even going to waste my time linking to a few examples of filtering programs, as a google search for ‘how to end spam’ comes up with 84,100,000 hits.

Well, this is going to be 84,100,001.

A while back AOL make a big stink in the blogosphere about it’s controversial policy of charging mass-emailers to access people with AOL email accounts. AOL was planning on charging a few cents per email sent to an @aol.com address and requiring payment before the email was delivered. Non-Profits were all up-in-arms and were eventually excluded from the new payment policy. Well that was all a few months ago and since then they’ve dropped out of the news and I don’t know how it’s working out for AOL, even if they are still charging (or if they ever started). And frankly, it’s AOL. I don’t really care.

You see, AOL had the right idea but the wrong implementation. It’s a great idea to charge the email sender a fee before their email ever sees it’s recipient. It’s how the postal system works, it’s how nearly all things in the world get moved from one place to another. AOL, though, targeted the wrong group. They targeted hobbyist groups, online retailers, fan sites, (spammers, of course) and anyone at all that ever sends a large number of emails at once. That hits many innocent emailers, and only makes a very small inconvenience to spammers who instead send out the same amount of junk, only in smaller packages.

So leads into my perfect* idea to end all spam. It begins with two simple questions: Have you ever added a spammer’s email address to your address book? Probably not. Question 2: Roughly how many legitimate emails a month do you get from someone you’ve not ever received mail from before or contacted before hand? Answer in my case: once, maybe twice a month.

My solution to ending spam: If you send me an email and your email address is not already in my list of contacts, you owe my email host $.25, email delivery upon payment. Or you could pay me, that’d be cool, but beside the point.

This will keep Larisa Sosnitskaya larisakygxayerwavjhsef@pacbell.net, Dante Cortes tkriebs@triwest.com, Kara Whalen tknowles@rabbitpunch.com, Jackson Ragland tkrause@herbalife.com, Lynda Huber tkw@fbglaw.com, Lindsey Harden tkwright@scotiabankinverlat.com, Larisa Sosnitskaya larisakyuuiyhvuqoca@netscape.net, Debbie Rosa tkolton@thgcorp.com and others from ever getting to my inbox, or even my spam folder. (Note: Those address are pulled from my GMail’s spam folder. Here’s to hoping that this page gets scraped by an email bot and gets added to spam lists like dan@hellyeahbitch.com did. Spammers spamming spammers. That would be a loverly world.)

And if they did pay? After sending out a few million emails that quarter-dollar would add up damn quick. Upon payment their email schlepping ‘enlargement pills’ would be promptly be ran thru my spam filters, flagged as junk, and placed in my spam folder to be auto-deleted after a week.

If I do know who you are and you just have a new address, well then I owe you a really cheap beer next time we’re out. If I don’t know you and you really want me to see your message, then cough up the cash, otherwise disappear and stop bothering me. If you’re a website that needs to send me an email to validate a new user account or something, give me a heads up with the address you’re going to use a few minutes before you try to mail me and I’ll add you to my contacts. See? It all works. My plan is perfect*.

This perfect* system does have one small intsy-tinsy flaw, though. It’s fairly easy to spoof an email address and make it look like it’s come from (say for example) paypal when it’s really some cretin trying to steal your bank info. In the past day I’ve gotten a few ‘update your account’ messages from security@paypal.com and account@ebay.com which I know to be fake because I’ve never gotten accounts with either company. This is why Yahoo’s Domain Keys ( http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys ) ought to be implemented by all email servers by default. They explain it best, but it’s a method of digitally signing an email and being able to verify that an email from @paypal.com really did come from paypal. Yahoo released Domain Keys under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 meaning that anyone and everyone is free to implement Domain Keys on their sever without needing to obtain permission from Yahoo or pay any fees. According to Wikipedia three big-name email hosts have already started singing all outgoing email messages by Domain Keys: Yahoo, Gmail and EarthLink.

There’s even an open-source plugin to Sendmail called domainkeys-milter that provides Domain Keys support. Sendmail, if you didn’t know, is a vastly-used mail program and #9 on Dvorak’s list of 10 most important programs ever.

So there it is. Delivery Upon Payment if you’re not in my address book.
If you’ve taken the time to read this whole long sprawling post, then jeez! Stand up for a while! A Tibetan Monk can’t sit for that long. But while you’re here, leave comment and tell me how great my idea is.

*almost