[throw10920]

> The problem is that spam was/is so bad that extreme measures were taken to curb it.

Man, and there's such an easy solution, too - just use Hashcash[1] (invented in 1997) and 90%+ of spam disappears overnight (if not more, depending on how high you set the difficulty).

Well, ok, "easy" in the sense that We Have An Algorithm For This - it'd still be hard to get email clients/servers to agree on a protocol...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

[dTal]

Ah yes, time to break out this old classic: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

  ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
  ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
  ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
  ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
  ( ) Sending email should be free

[throw10920]

It's fortunate that none of those are "checked" in the ASCII art, because none of them actually apply.

> Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

False. As a silver lining to the Google/Microsoft email oligopoly, those providers could announce that anyone wanting to send email to those services will have to implement this protocol, and it could be done in less than a year.

> Unpopularity of weird new taxes

Irrelevant. No taxes involved - there's no money here, and users won't care if their mail takes an extra few seconds to send, because they don't expect email to be low latency anyway

> Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money

Irrelevant - no new money involved.

> Huge existing software investment in SMTP

Irrelevant - a small number of server software are used by the majority of users. Also, see earlier point about oligopoly.

> Sending email should be free

Bad idea, and irrelevant, because it still would be.

I suggest you put thought into copypasta before putting it into a comment.

[throw0101a]

If there's a compromised machine it will be the victims paying the cost in energy bills for spammer's nefariously installed malware to send garbage.

[throw10920]

If there's a compromised machine, the scammer can drain the victim's bank accounts and cost them far more than an electricity bill, and/or mine cryptocurrency directly. Regardless, their spam-sending rate will still be significantly decreased.

So, this argument is completely invalid.

[throw0101a]

> If there's a compromised machine, the scammer can drain the victim's bank accounts […]

Not if the machine is a server and was gotten into via (e.g.) a bug in a web app. I don't know about you, but I don't keep my bank account information on the LAMP systems I sysadmin.

[throw10920]

That part of the post was specifically about consumer devices.

You missed the rest:

> and/or mine cryptocurrency directly. Regardless, their spam-sending rate will still be significantly decreased

Your argument remains invalid.