Correct me (politely please) if I’m wrong, but one of the easiest ways to eliminate spam would be to know for sure who is sending the e-mail. Authentication need not be complicated. Simply create a new standard for SMTP that would require TCP versus UDP connections. This would ensure that your mail server knows who it’s talking to when receiving e-mail. When you start getting spam from a particular domain, black-list that domain. Report it to the State of Virginia for prosecution :-). Or, be even more proactive. Quarantine all messages from domains you haven’t added to your white-list, or from those domains that haven’t converted over to the new standard.
Will this stop all spammers? No. There would still be some who would spam openly, there would be others who could somehow poison DNS or find other ways to impersonate someone else, but this would drastically reduce spam.
I know there would be a reduction in performance, and that this won’t be the end-all-spam solution, but it seems pretty darn simple in concept and seems relatively easy to implement.
Let me know what you think.
