Pulling the plug on spam

For Nik Rawlinson, weary of unsolicited email, spam is a dish best served cold.

A year ago, US researchers surveyed 2,000 internet users. Asked who they would like to have oversee the online world, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and the Pope came out top, in spite of the fact that none of them had a made a single manifesto pledge.

So, with the one-year anniversary fast approaching, I'm knocking my proposals into shape in case the idea should ever be taken seriously. To make things easy, I plan to campaign on a single issue: spam.

The only problem is, the more I think about it the harder it is to come up with even one viable tactic. See what you think.

Spammers send truckloads of email, largely because it's free. So, I propose we change that rule.

From now on it should read 'the more you send the more you pay'. It would be difficult to police, and would rely on governments charging other nations according to the amount of mail they send.

Passing the buck
So, an email that originates in the US and passes through Canada and The Netherlands on its way to the UK would be taxed at every point. The UK would charge The Netherlands for accepting it; The Netherlands would pass on the cost to Canada; which in turn would pass it back to America.

It would then be up to the American networks to either bear the cost themselves or pass it on to the originator of each mail.

But that would be like the teacher keeping the whole class back because the bully wouldn't own up. Just sending a single email would suddenly cost you a small sum of money, simply because of the irresponsibility of a few online direct marketers.

So, how about a sliding scale where the first 100 or so emails each month are free. This would cover the vast majority of us, after which the next 20 would cost a penny, the following dozen 2p, and after that 5p for every single email sent.

Now before you say it, I know what you're thinking. It's a good idea but the moment Mr Spam realises that he can simply switch email addresses every 99 mails and not pay at all it falls flat on its face.

Well, true, so it looks like we should have to start charging from the first email sent after all. A penny each would add up to just a pound for 100 emails - a fair bargain. Most people could even stomach a fiver for their first 100 if it came to that.

Trouble is, with a flat fee it would be comparatively more expensive to send mail from nations with weaker economies, and any scale that took this into account, or an email subsidy paid by the richer nations to those that most needed it, would only encourage the spammers to relocate their servers, potentially bankrupting the poorer nation they adopted.

So, how about making it illegal to add someone to a mailing list without sending a confirmation email that, if ignored, sees them automatically unsubscribed before the first marketing message is even sent?

A lot of mailing lists do this already, but it's the ones that don't that demonstrate its flaw; simply don't tell someone they are subscribed and you'll get off scot-free.

You see, the trouble with all of these ideas, and the others I don't have room for here, is that they rely on every nation with an internet connection agreeing to abide by the decisions of this theoretical elected board.

As we saw in July, when the US controversially refused to be bound by the International Criminal Court in favour of imposing its own blinkered version of international law, if we don't all play by the same rules there's no point in playing at all. The answer, as I see it, relies on spam victims fighting back. This is how ...

Revenge is sweet
One of the things I most regret doing was to post a message to a newsgroup using my real email address. The second was putting my email address on my web page. Each of these contributed to 500 or so pieces of spam I receive each week.

So, on the bottom of every web page I or you design from this day forward we should include the address of someone who has spammed our inboxes.

We'll make it the same colour as the background so that it won't distract our visitors, but will still be harvested by the tools that email marketers use to produce lists of addresses to target.

I'll do the same with my postings to newsgroups, and include an address at the bottom of each message. Feel free to join in with that one too.

It will be like the scene at the end of The Hunt for Red October where the Soviet captain realises with horror that he has targeted his own boat.

Before they work out quite how it's happened the spammers will find themselves drowning in a flood of unsolicited email ... from themselves.

It's a crude revenge, but it could serve a practical purpose. Their bandwidth will be gobbled up at double-speed and they'll perhaps even be fined or disconnected by their upstream providers.

Pretty soon those CD-Roms of 10 million verified email addresses that they are so keen to sell in the emails they send will contain only their own addresses, and the only people they are selling them to will be each other.

For the rest of us the internet will suddenly become a very quiet place indeed.