[brightball]

> virtually all the spam coming in had valid SPF / DKIM / DMARC, as do most of the phishing attacks.

This should create a means to go after the domain owners via registrar and trail of ownership, even so far as blocking email from the domain.

Forcing the spammers to pass DMARC creates a burden and an evidence trail that didn't exist before.

[WorldMaker]

Can we use DMARC to ask Gmail to close registrations? Google Calendar to allow far fewer people the ability to send invite notifications? Firebase to close registrations? Azure? Microsoft 365? AWS SES?

It feels like the biggest spammers have swung back to just abusing SaaS and getting SPF / DKIM / DMARC for free from one of the big email providers.

[bcrl]

Exactly this. Spammers have the technical competence to overcome any technical hurdle, so using evidence of technical competence achieves nothing.

If it were possible to charge $0.25/email for delivery, I'd be more than happy . However, I'm sure large tech firms will need to say that is "too hard to implement at scale".

[WorldMaker]

Stamp costs don't stop snail mail spam, either, unfortunately. I would be concerned if we added something like bitcoin fees to email delivery rather than curtail spam it would just further encourage grifters seeking ROI on their spam deliveries.

[ebcode]

What if a single email cost $0.001 cent to send, and it was paid to the recipient? For $10, you could send 10,000 emails. For recipients, every 1,000 emails they get is a dollar in their wallet. You’d need something like a blockchain for this to work because the traditional payment processors still haven’t figured out micropayments.

[locknitpicker]

> What if a single email cost $0.001 cent to send, and it was paid to the recipient? For $10, you could send 10,000 emails. For recipients, every 1,000 emails they get is a dollar in their wallet.

I'm not sure you realize your proposal's only contribution is to worsen spam. You are unwittingly creating an incentive for email providers to lift anti-abuse filters and to maximize the volume of spam delivered to you.

[wahern]

If snail mail cost $0.001 per recipient people would be getting much, much more junkmail. Likewise, if e-mail cost as much as even bulk snail mail, there'd be much less spam.

Some sort of payment scheme is really the best, most durable option. The problem of mailing-lists and personal correspondence could be solved by an exclusion mechanism where the recipient effectively whitelists senders, explicitly or implicitly (e.g. whitelist a replying-sender automatically if a recipient initiates a conversation).

[ryandrake]

The problem with a payment scheme is that spammers (who make money by spamming) will happily pay as a cost of doing business (or negotiate discounts/deals), but Joe User might just look at the cost and say, "you know what, maybe I'll send this as SMS instead of E-mail."

So the end result will be more spam and fewer legit E-mails.

[locknitpicker]

> If it were possible to charge $0.25/email for delivery, I'd be more than happy .

I'm baffled by this blend of replies. What exactly do you believe charging for an email would do? I mean, other than fabricating a revenue stream. Do you seriously believe that spam would vanish as soon as anyone charged for it's delivery? Because advertisers already pay for reaching their target audiences, and do so well beyond email.

[illliillll]

What spammers are using the same domain for longer than couple of hours?

What do you expect to achieve by blocking an already abandoned domain?

[acdha]

@gmail.com and @outlook.com are like 90% of the spam I receive. What’s missing is effective accountability for those two companies hosting persistent spam groups who operate for months unimpeded.

[bigbuppo]

They're generally hosted on a google or microsoft 365 or something slightly less shady. Good luck with that.