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As I've predicted in the past, SPAM is far from being vanquished by the so-called spam-blockers which have recently been highly touted.
The best way to deal with spam doesn't involve a single magic bullet, in my opinion. It is going to have to be a combination of several approaches, none of which include legislation, which I feel is ineffective and is not the government's job.
One technique is simply to use a good challenge/response e-mail system. Tecnically speaking I'd go with a "Third party delete from pop3 auto blacklister / whitelister, with bayesian filtering, collaborative filtering, user subject line filtering, and optional challenge-response", such as the one currently being brought into the market by Spameater and others. This basically means that the first time someone sends you e-mail they will get a response back that says that they are an unknown address to the system and that they will have to type in a word shown in an image in order to get their e-mail to you, after which their address will be whitelisted (unless you blacklist them) and they won't have to go through it again. Spammers most of the time wouldn't even receive an auto-reply e-mail, and even if they did, they don't have the time to reply to millions of these e-mails.
Another technique would be to have an agreement by the computer standards organizations about an upgraded SMTP protocol. This could then reject all messages without a true and valid SMTP stamp, which would act much like caller-ID now works for phones. If e-mail tries to go through any major servers without the valid SMTP stamp it would simply be killed. This would also be useful as ISPs or individual users could automatically reject e-mails without valid SMTP information or at least see where it is coming from before they open it.
A technique for individual ISPs would be to set limits on how many e-mails a day can be sent out by users. Most users wouldn't need to send out more than a few hundred a day, ever. But in those cases where that is legitimate, then those accounts can be sent up to another level where they can send more e-mails after a review of why they are sending so many.
Individual users can be smart about where they use their e-mail address. They can also create "shells" of e-mail addresses that then forward on to their main address for those times when they have to sign up for something. Say for example that you want to sign up for a newsletter called Joe's Newsletter and that your address was JohnDoe@whatever.com. Users simply create a new address or alias called JohnDoe_JoesNewsletter@whatever.com and point it to forward to their normal address. Since you'd never reply to this address but would only get stuff from it, then as soon as junk started coming from that address you'd know they sold it and could kill the address, and if necessary give them a new one, informing them that the address you originally gave them and only them had started receiving spam and that you suspected they had sold it.
I think a combination of these types of techniques could go a long way in curbing the spam problem. But, what it all comes down to is that there are enough people responding to spam to make it profitable. As soon as that number becomes too small to make money, the spammers will stop. Whether through education, filters, ISP efforts, or whatever technique is used, when the money stops flowing so will the spam.
