John Dvorak of Ziff Davis suggested a "solution" that the ISPs could implement. If the ISP acknowledged each email by sending back a "problem" that required a one or two second calculation, and return of a correct answer, before accepting any email, the spammers would be out of business.

First - a fake address wouldn't work, because they'd never receive the "problem," and all their transmissions would be undelivered.

Second - the spammers rely on being able to send several thousand emails per minute - and their return rate is so low that even a second or two for each message would literally sink them.

The delay for anyone sending "normal" traffic would be no worse than the slight delay I get while Norton scans each outgoing message.

This would impose a slight extra message burden on the ISPs, but 80 percent of messages are now SPAM - so doubling the traffic per valid message would still get them a 60 percent gain in capacity - if the SPAM was eliminated.

Any such solution may have hidden faults that need to be examined before implementing, but this one is simple enough to look pretty reasonable. If he can come up with something this simple, certainly the ISPs could too, if they really wanted to.

John