I have a way to reduce the volume of spam tremendously, so that existing filters would be more effective at stopping messages: have your email provider block all incoming email with incomplete or erroneous routing information in the mail header. Here's how it works:
1) when an email comes in to your email provider, it includes a 'header' that has lots of details on where it came from, how it got to you, and what it contains. This is the stuff that spammers fake to fool your inbox.2) why not have the receiving system compare the supposed route that the email arrived through (the actual name or IP address of the receiving email server) to their known list of real ones. If the supposed route is invalid, delete the message.3) spammers could still try to track down the server names and addresses to get through, but the volume that do so would be much lower, and then the regular spam filters would kick in anyway and stop more and more of them.
The benefit would be that it would increase the cost and effort to send blanket spam all over the place, so the barrier to entry into the spammer market would be higher.
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Great idea! ISP's would need to volunteer to review for erroneous routing data but I think they would want to do this if it stopped the tremendous email volume caused by spammers!!
There are many technologies that do just that, including CallerId for email, Yahoo Domain Keys, and SPF.
The biggest issue is a sizable amount of spam is send by spam zombies, machines infected by trojans that send spam email. The domain and IP are real in this case.
Few problems with this: 1) You'd have a list of millions (or billions) of routes, and only a fraction of them would be actual valid routes. 2) You'd need some way to verify these routes, if not by message acceptance alone. This would result in more overall traffic (although this could be offset by savings from unrouted mail). 3) Spammers would eventually use known routes from valid mail, if they do not already do so.