this article talks about an idea for killing spam, dead. they say that you set up a company who gets paid for sending email from you. each email you send is sent though them and then digitally signed. now. that sounds good, but it cost money. they say 1c per email. now it doesent sound like a lot, but just look at some of the emails i send. i sent out about 20 invites to my 21st drinking session there a few days ago. i got replys and replyed again. some of them lasted about 5 or 6 emails. so, thats a good few emails sent. i have an idea though on how to semi solve this problem:

PGP. anyone who sends you an email that is not PGP signed, its just put somewhere else. a fair amount of mailing lists im on have users signing their emails. if the rest did that it would work. maybe set the server to do it. the PGP signature cant be forged as its generated each time an email is sent. i read somewhere about setting up a mail server that does this. get your friends to get PGP, which is free (i think, or GNUPG if PGP aint free) and its fairly simple to do. not sure if it would work, and you could probably fake a cert from gnupg as their no real testing to see if you are who you say you are, and i supose the spammers could just pgp their mail too, but in an other way, spammers could just bulk buy mail with the other option. if the company that is charging to send mail is a proper company, they can be bought and money is the root of all evil. spammers buy 2million emails from them and thats it. the service is out the window.