IMO we have 2 problems to solve or at least address BETTER than we do today: one is human nature and the other is technological.

Human Nature:
I acknowledge that we are always going to have users who are _duped_ by email scams/advertising/you-name-it, that's a form of social engineering of course and we'll ALWAYS have it. While user education will help, there is a natural human tendancy of trust you are fighting against: people are trusting. So while we cannot ignore or avoid training and educating our users, it wont work by itself.

Technological:
I am however, hopefull that efforts by the IETF's Anti-Spam Research Group will produce some standards that we can use it to at least REDUCE the amount of SPAM traversing the Internet. I also acknowledge that this is many many months if not years away. I have heard that they are working pretty hard on it, as opposed to the normal slow process (which does have a purpose I know but we all dont like SPAM...right?).

Most proposals on the drawing/discussion board at ASRG are based on ways to validate that the sender is authorized to send the email to the recipient. Some example methods include authentication, modifying mail exchangers, using DomainKeys (a proposed method of authentication from Yahoo Inc.) and standardizing C/R (challenge/response) systems. Authentication won't stop SPAM but require registration and allow us to blacklist them. The DomainKeys is interesting as it adds a digital signature and public key to a header of a message. Software on the DNS server validates the keys. This wont break existing systems because existing standards allow for experimental headers.

If you have some solutions in place like above, you can setup (and should do so) delivery verify to ensure your message was delivered. Delivery verification will grow to be more important in near and long term future as anti-SPAM solutions are deployed which could potentially filter out _good_ emails. I know that I expect EVERY ONE of my emails are delivered to the recipient, otherwise I would have received a Delivery Failure...right (unless it was flagged as SPAM ).

Hope I didn't put anyone to sleep with this, just some thoughts.

By-the-by, here are some links to some of the stuff I mentioned above:
* ASRG SMTP-VERIFY: http://asrg.sp.am/subgroups/smtp_verify.shtml
* Interesting new draft called _No Soliciting SMTP Service Extension_, kind of like the do-not-call-list of telemarketers: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/...iciting-06.txt