Judging by the 6,000 bounced spam messages rattling around in my mail router’s queue, all addressed to blatantly made up “people” at binary-ape.org, my domain is being used to fake the ‘From’ addresses of thousands of nasty spam emails offering penis medicines to fundamentally stupid people.
It really is astonishing that people can give their credit card details to sites with randomly generated URLs like “ftqolspstmtleil.com.r1vpvibat2rpsu9.[-censored-]”, with the aim of actually using the ‘medicine’.
I don’t think much can be done to save email. Even adding new antispam measures like SPF will do little to help, unless there is an organised movement to simply drop all messages sent without adequate safeguards. SMTP email, as used today, has to be abandoned.
The XMPP/Jabber protocols, although never meant to replace SMTP, could easily do the job with only a few, simple extensions to the existing set.
