Change email programs to make them permission based. When an email is received if it is from someone who has permission to send you email it will get through. If not an automatic reply will be sent that allows the sender to apply for permission. I am not sure exactly how that would work but it could be a survey or something that the user could review on his/her own time to approve or deny senders. The basic idea of the survey is that you have to know me somehow. Any email from pending senders would be kept in a holding area for a while so the sender won't have to send the original email. If the survey was easy to customize and could have required answers spammers probably couldn't create correct automatic resonses. Example survey: [M] means answer required (others can be left blank). [A] means a correct answer automatically approves the sender [R] means an incorrect answer rejects the sender
[M] Name: [R] Address: [R] Old address: [R] High school [R] College [R] Employeer [R] Old Employeer [R] Church Product (Product that I have bought, downloaded, etc) [A] Pin given (could also be included in first mail headers) Other (If nothing else filled out most likely this will never be read)-- Stauffer, Mar 14 2003 [Stauffer]'s link... http://www.spamlion.com...as a link [angel, Oct 17 2004] Persimmon link http://www.oplin.li...mmon/persimmon.html [bungston, Oct 17 2004] Microsoft anti-spam technology http://www.pcworld....tk,dn041703X,00.aspPC-World article about similar Microsoft anti-spam technology [Stauffer, Oct 17 2004] Web based example http://about.mailbl....com/challenge.html [Stauffer, Oct 17 2004] Another example http://www.blockallspam.net/ [Stauffer, Oct 17 2004] TMDA http://tmda.net/Tagged Message Delivery Agent [quarl, Nov 09 2004] It's calling whitelisting and it's very baked.-- waugsqueke, Mar 14 2003 It looks like http://www.spamlion.com/ does most of that but it appears to only run on a server. It would be nice to have an email client do it.-- Stauffer, Mar 14 2003 ([Stauffer], you can add links using the 'link' button below your idea text. That way, they become clickable.)-- angel, Mar 14 2003 random, halfbakery