End the arms race

Spam has been a problem for a long time now. It reduced the usefulness of the email system, requiring people to filter their mails in order to make it useful again. This filtering has led to an arms race between spammers and people writing anti-spam tools: every time the anti-spammers write better filters, it will take just a short while before the spammers find a way to circumvent the better filters, and there we go again.

Of course, the spammers have an interest in reaching you. Some of the spammed people are probably interested in what they're being spammed with, and react to whatever is in the spam mail, increasing the amount of money in the spammer's bank account.

A portion of these spam mails, while annoying, don't contain illegal content, nor do they try to trick you into giving the spammer money without him giving you anything in return. Still, those spams try to subverse our spam filters because otherwise, they wouldn't reach anyone

This is silly. So people outlawed most types of unsolicited email sending, making it legal under only certain circumstances. Unfortunately, the regulation that exists today in the United States seems entirely unhelpful -- adding some lines of prescribed text to your email will make it look legal, but it really isn't; this makes prosecution very hard.

I'm proposing another type of regulation: rather than throwing all types of email on a hoop, require that people who send unsolicited bulk mail add some headers to the email — say, things like Precedence: bulk, Advertisement-Type: unsolicited, and Category: porn, for example. Then the people actually interested in porn spam (if any) could set their filters so that they do get it in their inbox, while everyone else can easily throw the junk away. Without requiring 90% of their CPU to be spent on spamscanning, and without too many false positives.

This will of course not make the entire problem go away — consider 419 scams, fishing and other types of social engineering where people try to help you get rid of your money in unlawful manners; but I think it will go a long way towards the goal of not getting any unwanted email in your inbox.