We are all being affected by [tag]image spam[/tag]. What’s especially annoying are the “returned email” image spam that I get a few hundred of every day. I am to the point where I’d love to just completely ignore the RFCs, and promote not bouncing these mails back to their supposed sender, because it’s just a sophisticated way for a spammer to pelt people with crap, and make it walk right through things like [tag]SpamAssassin[/tag].

I’d know. I’m getting 200-300 of these bounces per day. I’ve become rather drastic in my measures to stop them, too: Trying a procmail rule based on scoring. If the email contains a gif, give it some points. If the email is then shown to be from the two trusted senders I have, subtract enough points to lower the score. If the score is positive, DUMP THE EMAIL. If it’s zero, or negative, allow the email to pass.
I’m going to even adapt that rule to deal with all the attachment based returns, once I grab a mimetype for it.

I’m sick of the spam, and honestly, I don’t care about the rules anymore.

We need [tag]Email2.0[/tag], not Web2.0, much sooner than you’d believe. It’s pretty much proven that the current email system isn’t trustable — you may as well go back to snail mail, where there’s a lot less of the crap in your inbox, even if they only deliver six days a week, but your letter has more of a chance getting there than through email, where you’re blown up by the anti-spam minefields and the spammers have an express lane to your inbox.

It’d be nice to force everyone to sign their emails using a key that only they can generate. Force authentication of some sort. Make people prove they are real.

I’m just sick of the email crap.