How about having email sent in 2 steps instead of directly? After sending it the first time it bounces back directly asking the sender to answer some question that can't be answered automatically (like when you sign up for a free email account). You then send the message again, with the answer. Your ISP only delivers email that has a correct answer attached to the mail.
Only people that make that extra personal effort can reach you. I don't think spammers would like to make this effort.
Is this technically possible? I wouldn't mind to send email twice in an effort to stop spam. And I wouldn't mind to pay my ISP a little more for their effort to keep my mailbox spam free.
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See: http://securityfocus.com/infocus/1766
I though that this was already available via the Challenge/Response system. There are a number of ISP's that support this as well as programs that one can load on their own system.
It happens that there are some people/mailing lists that don't like this, and you can decide to "anoy" them or use another sustem.
At this time there are also other technoques, and I am sure that others will add/correct my impression. e.g.
1) Detection and Filtering of spam -- I believe Bright mail somehow sees mail that is sent to mailboxes that have not asked for mail, and filters them.
2) Filtering based on content -- Bayes filters, etc. look at the content of mail and filter out mail that has words... that are usually associated with mail.
3) Postage -- There are some proposals that suggest we should only accept mail, perhaps from un-know senders, if they are willing to pay a minor sender charge. The assumption is that people would be willing to pay a cent, or so to send a message where as mass malling would not.
4) Sender verification -- There are other proposals that suggest that we upgrade our mail system so that we are sure that the person who sent the mail really did, or we can determine what to do if they are not verified.
Personally, I like: Postage and verification, though the Chalenge/response is ok ALSO...
the challenge response on every e-mail is really a pain. There are systems available that do the challenge response only when an e-mail is recieved from a new sender, but the commitment to these systems is not widespread.
Blue Bottle, an Australian company that provides free email accounts, has implemented a spam-verification step into their system.
"Bluebottle uses a verification system that ONLY accepts email from known senders. When Bluebottle receives an email from an address not on your Allowed list, a verification request is sent asking the sender to verifythemselves in one of two ways. A successful response to a verification request automatically places the sender's address on your Allowed list. Your desired verification method can be selected from the Verification Method page."
Messages received from unverified addresses go into a "Pending" folder. If you're using the account for something like job hunting, and are afraid of asking employers to verify their email accounts, you can set your security level to "None: Accept all mail", at which point it'll behave just like a Hotmail account, people will be able to send without any additional steps.
The problem with the idea is that sometimes a business needs to send automated email messages to inform their members about various things--sometimes VERY IMPORTANT notices. If this business needs to send 100,000 emails by hand with human interaction, they will need a huge staff to accomplish this. Sending these 100,000 emails would go from $0.001 to like $5,000.00. Depending upon the function of the business, many of them will go out of business--and this is upsetting to the email user who benefited from that business.