Spam's end? Maybe, if time allows

Twenty-five years ago Steven T. Kirsch built a better mouse. Now he believes he has found a way to create a better trap for spam.
The New York Times

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[hadaso]

As usual the real issue is ovelooked

The real test of an spam blocking system is not how much spam manges to get through, but how much legitimate mail doesn't. And the real problem with this is that the most important mail one gets is not one's usual mail, so looking for patterns in received mail might be good at letting the usual unimportant mail through (the "intranet spam") but would not recognize those rare very important messages.

The only solution to spam is to make this kind of advertising more expensive to the advertisers, and the only way to make it expensive enough is to make them pay in years (in prison) instead of in dollars.