Comments:

There are a number of things that could go a long way to helping build this system better so that almost everyone can be happy with the results and performance. The e-mail internet standards could even use an over-haul. For instance, in addition to the subject and from lines, another line could be added, "Category" This would be used to identify the companies involved, and the category of the e-mail. All three of these fields could be required by all internet mail protocalls. The local ISP could have a system inplace with a basic AI-based expert system to identify these categories and process them. A similar Expert system could be incorporated into the clients e-mail software systems to properly label the e-mail based on the content of the e-mail. It would not be too much different from a voice recognition system currently in place. And not very CPU intensive, on a per-e-mail bases. Mass e-mails, mailing lists, would be processed as one message, under the same category. This would allow more advanced filtering on the recieving side, for both personal and corporate e-mail systems. The implementation of rewarding those who supply info on violations could be done on a points program. Simply e-mail the violation spam with a full header to an organization that tracks down the violators and punishes them with bills for $ that would pay for the damages they caused by taking time on servers to send these messages, adding in the time it takes for the users to filter and delete the message. Outstanding bills could be sent to a collection agency, or result in prosecution. 3rd time offenders should be black listed from ISPs. International ISP's should be held accountable through international trade regulations and additional import tarrifs, because it's the importing of international e-mail....aka Nigeria 419 Scams!!! binary e-mails should affect this new category field, as well as html e-mails, or e-mails containing imbedded links, activeX controls, or other imbedded scripts. Client side software filtering software would then have a better chance of identifying if the category field, and other fields combined with e-mail content identify it as spam violations, legitimate comercial information, friends/family e-mail, or friend-forward spam. Identifying e-mails with binarys and scripts seperately will also help with processing these categories. Finally they will make dial-up users happy because all these e-mails requiring to download a script or binary image can be filtered off to a seperate folder and they won't accedently click on them. The folder could even be copied to a local folder and/or emptied remotely without downloading all the imbedded devices. The sender should be warned if their message is being marked under a certain category, and why so that they can correct their behavior in the e-mail. E-mails that fall under a certain category....such as XXX could be blocked by the server per the users settings. The server would return a message to the sender that the message was undeliverable....very similar to how the message is currently returned if the e-mail does not exist. Server side account settings should include age determinations for the user....as a requirement. Such determinations could be used to define a pre-set series of user settings that also could be modified by a guidance counselor or parential guardian. These account settings could also contain liscenses to distribute under certain categories. So if you wanted to distribute mailing lists, or a blog e-mail, you would have to be liscensed to do so by the ISP. In which case you are being tracked. certain categories could require additional registration techniques, and or paid fees, such as regestering, and becoming liscensed to distribute Pornographic e-mail, per a porn-internet business. International e-mails that are compliant should not have import tarriffs, and should be treated same as a local e-mail, to help free-trade and world economy.