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Seems very appealing, but dont let them off the hook that easily, I say sentence them to a bar, with nothing but undesirable people who want to sell everything, that have to ask 'just to make sure' as often as possible. Then you can let them choose between staying there, and the death penalty after a good year

Forgot,, the bar ran out of alchohol...

Edited 2008-05-04 19:56 UTC

you're not going to solve this problem by the government. the system simply has to be set up on the client side to approve or reject emails from specific people.

Better yet:

The government should offer a dead-or-alive reward for known spammers.

Let some people do a good deed and, in the process, put their kids through college on the reward money. The general public would get justice faster without costing millions more in silly court battles, legal fees, appeals, media grandstanding, etc.

Better all around, IMO.

(I'm only half-joking. :p)

Well, more than 90% of today's mail amount is spam. It's worth thinking about why this is.

This could be a problem because many users "just" running a PC at home are spammers - or at least provide the required functionalities for spamming so an external attacker can easily occupy their PC and use it for spreading spam (collect mail addresses, scan subnets for mail servers, get private mail address book, send messages etc.). Seriously, users are running "spam servers" and don't know. Should they get punished? Yes, of course.

Ah yes, and the software manufacturers that make it "too easy" to set-up a PC that can be compromized that fast should be punished, too. I'm not putting the name of such a manufacturer here. :-)

Spam is never a "thing on its own", it's used for marketing (or at least for stupid advertising). So the firms that want to sell their products via spam advertisements should get punished, too. This is because such firms pay criminals to do the spamming, so they're involved, too.

Regarding dead or alive - alive, please.

As you may know, death penalty (in general) doesn't scare criminals very much. They tend to think something like: "Oh yeah, I do the big deal, and if they get me, I go asleep without any pain, that's no problem." No, make it more scary: Known spammers will have to go to prison for more than 10 years (otherwise they don't care), but not in Europe, not in the USA - no, they are exported into a foreign country where human rights are a no-go. The "helping hands" I mentioned above would have to be treated the same way, maybe with a prison in their own country or for not so many years.

This will teach them.

That's my take too - I've got the four major services online all the time - and yeah, yahoo is BAD for IM spam... The worst of the services in fact, though AIM and MSN both get their share which is why I have a block/ignore list in Trillian that's climbing up to over a thousand addresses now.

Hell, the only messenger service I don't get spam through is ICQ - but how many people actually use that anymore?