Is it a naive idea? I waste SO much time now dealing with spam that eludes my ISP and Gmail filters – I’d say as much as an hour a week and that does not factor in the frustration and potential for lost “real” email.
My proposal is to create a fund through voluntary, very small personal contributions of a few dollars and larger ISP contributions to pay people to personally identify spammers, their businesses, and their location. Spam Bounty Hunters.
This blacklisted database would be available to all with an excellent feedback forum to quickly remedy false positives. If they protest, the accused would be deemed innocent until proven guilty by 95% agreement in forum feedback.
However, those deemed spammers would be tracked and followed as they changed businesses, emails, etc, and would be hounded by the masses via email, telephone, and real visits. Collectively the “community” would make the costs of *even trying spamming* greater than any benefits.
Unlike current blacklists used by ISPs, this would bring the collective intelligence, and collective outrage, to bear against spammers.
Those who chose to be “spam bounty hunters” would be compensated from the fund by a formula designed to distribute whatever amount was in the fund devided by an estimate of the number of total email spammers (or some other formula designed to pay out at the rate the problem is fixed).
Over in China, people are getting paid a few bucks a day to play second life and accumulate Linden dollars for affluent US SecondLifers. Wouldn’t this be a better use of their time?
Joe Duck 