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by paddez 1479 days ago
This was the concept behind HashCash, the concept behind BitCoin/Cryptocurrencies in general.

The idea being that each email would do a non-trivial amount of work, such compute a valid hash - encode it in the message header. This message header can be checked quickly on receivers side, but takes time for the sender.

This makes sending a large amount of email quickly infeasible without a significant amount of compute power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash