>To me, the approach you advocate is something like saying "do away with any centralized >law enforcement, force everyone to carry guns, and if anyone suspects that someone >else is committing a crime, they are obliged to shoot them." I believe that blocking >spam at its source is far easier than blocking it at every possible destination. The >less parties involved in blocking the spam, the higher the probability that the spam >will be successfully blocked.
To do this you need to form a police force and a judiciary. Neither are possible in the absence of an organized society. The first step is for some of the larger senders/receivers of email to sit down around a table and form an email services consortium that can set "best current practice" standards and police those standards. This is something that network operators can do. --Michael Dillon