[dane-pgp]

> I don't mind doing some paperwork or paying a fee to prove I'm legit.

Then how about this: The big email companies all declare one day that any newly registered domain (with an MX record) needs to post a bond for good behaviour in escrow somewhere. If any of them find the domain being used to send spam, they can slash the bond (sending it to some charity or something).

This has the advantage that it doesn't affect any existing senders (so there's no one to complain about it), and it makes transparent the cartel-like power that these companies have over email. Perhaps, to democratise the process a bit, the ITU could organise a ballot (one vote per country) to elect 5 companies/non-profits who would have this bond-slashing power.

Unfortunately to implement something like this, they'd also probably have to demand that DKIM signing become mandatory (so there are cryptographic proofs of any evidence of spamming), and this sort of global consensus / money processing scheme would probably end up being built using a blockchain, whether that was a good idea or not.

[hug]

I can just imagine the headline. “Ask HN: Google sent my mail bond to charity for no reason and has torpedoed my small business, and I can’t get in touch with anyone to make it right”

[dane-pgp]

I can imagine headlines like that too, but the idea of electing 5 (or some other odd number of) entities is that they would be able to share among themselves the cryptographically signed evidence of the spam they detected, and then the bond slashing would require a majority vote.

So instead, the headline should be something like "Ask HN: Google, Amazon, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation forced me to send $100 of Ether to UNICEF and I couldn't send any new emails until I sent another $100 payment to my domain registrar. How do I take them to the World Court to force them to reimburse me?". That's not a great situation, but it's slightly better than the status quo.

[AdrianEGraphene]

You're describing one of the solutions made by Ironport, "Bonded Sender". Their solutions were sold to Return Path and Cisco later bought them out, presumably with the bonded sended solution still belonging to Return Path? [1,2]

I've never seen discussion of this in the mainstream though... so I'm not sure if it's actually being used or just shelved.

At this point, I think any proprietary they've created is game for usage. But it's very hard to get multiple large organizations to adopt this.

I definitely think it's a solution.

[1] https://archive.ph/CH98s [2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2548788/cisco-to-acqui...