Oliver Jones wrote: I really should reply to this on the wiki page; I might cut-and-pase some of it later if I can find a point where it's appropriate..
Certain things should be made illegal. Ie, domain or email forging. If you don't have permission from the domain or email owner to use an email
Many of these things are already illegal; using hacked computers that you have no authority for, sending pornographic email to persons of unconfirmed age, selling prescription drugs without a prescription, selling medication to purchasers in the USA that does not have FDA approval or even passes basic food hygene standards, selling pirated copies of copyright software. I doubt there's a single spam in my Junk folder that doesn't break at least one existing law.
People could still send spam. But they would have to do it via "legitimate" servers. Ie, ones they owned. It would then be a case of blocking those servers/networks that repeatedly offended.
Most of the spam being sent now is via hacked home computers. If the end user can send mail, so can the spammer that has administrator access to their home computer. The real answer to spam, and viruses, and DDoS attacks, and many other problems on the intarweb right now, is to improve the general security of home computers. This would force the spammers back to using the much smaller set of mailservers that they actually OWN, and deny them the resources that they currently have for DoSing blacklist servers and anti-spam sites.