My next step in email madness control would be voluntary. Allow a trusted, pooled, and funded authority to instantly kill any mail box provided by an email service provider– pending resolution that the mail box was actually used for fraud, deception, or unsolicited business. Any other use would be allowed, so that governments don’t get a chance to stanch free political speech.

They could pool together one or two humans, hopefully multilingual (not many languages are necessary to understand, and most 419/lotto/phish fraud seems to be in English anyway) could stop the flows on a 24/7 basis. This could dramatically eliminate those that can now fool ‘captchas’ and make rapid and huge numbers of phantom, illicit email accounts. This would require trust. It would also require each email service provider to actually look at the accounts to determine that the account was used for one of these three purposes, and decide to permanently disable the account, or to re-enable its use. Would the big email providers agree? I doubt they’d listen to any of us. I have a feeling they don’t care. I’d support the initiative, but I’m one more peon in an ocean of them to email providers.

Tomorrow: how ISPs/MSPs enable this, and why we should route around them.