9 Out Of 10 E-mail Messages Are Now Spam

This is getting ridiculous. They also talk about pirated home computers being used to send e-mails. I'm pretty sure my old stand-apart computer that I use for stupidity like MP3s, personal e-mail, pron, and stuff like that is infected. I've got to take that poor old thing off line and upgrade. Windows 98: Bluh.

Actually, my favorite idea for stopping spam is one that has been around for 14 years, and is pushed by Microsoft: Make each computer "solve a puzzle" (i.e. pause for about 8 or 9 seconds) to send a single e-mail. I send 20 or 30 e-mails a day, and that would be 3 or 4 minutes of my computer's processing time. However, a spammer, in order to send 1 million spam e-mails a day would need 100 computers running full tilt 24 hours a day. (And 1 million e-mails is about 1% of what a spammer sends on an average day.)

It really is time to do something, and working from the source of the e-mail is the best approach.