Gleick on spam

"I know what your in-box looks like, and it isn't pretty," says James Gleick in a monster 4,500-word article on spam in the New York Times magazine [free reg req'd]. If you don't make it to the end, he reckons two simple actions would stem the tide: "(1) Forging Internet headers should be made illegal. The system depends on accurate information about senders and servers and relays; no one needs a right to falsify this information. (2) Unsolicited bulk mail should carry a mandatory tag. That alone would put consumers back in control; all the complex technological challenge of identifying the spam would vanish."