The Wild Wild West of a Civilized World

A recent report that Spammers are taking advantage of the interest in the US Elections to try and peddle Viagra along with the other things that Spammers are taking advantage of - like Valentines day - make me think that things are getting worse instead of better and also makes me wonder if we are going to have to go to some form of 'walled city' for our e-mail.

The SMTP standard was designed to be open and people at that time (about 30 years ago now) wanted such an open system that there are now gaping holes that Spammers are using to send a deluge of Spam to our users.
 
What the Spammers are doing at the moment must be effective because I review the daily logs from our systems and this is really brought to light when on a Sunday, not a typical business day, our systems processs in excess of 1.5 million messages. Out of that number less than 13,000 or LESS than 1% (0.866%) were allowed through to the mail servers. Now we don't claim that we can block 100% of Spam so there is a very small percentage that get's through so let's say that 1/10 of 1% of the 13,000 is Spam. That means that out of 1.5 million messages only 13 Spam messages got through to our users.
 
This brings up two interesting questions:

1. How many people are buying from Spammers?

- If only a handful of messages are getting through the Spammers must have a high close ratio and a high margin to make this make economic sense.
 
2. Are we going about solving the Spam problem the wrong way?

- Why should we have to process 1.5 million messages when less than 1% are legitimate?
 
Some organizations have to be more open to whom they accept e-mail from because that is the nature of their business - online sales from almost anyone - but what about those organization that only get a few e-mail messages from a few select partners? Could they setup a closed e-mail system where there is a process to be added to their accept list and reject all other e-mails? They could even setup 2 e-mail domains. The first with a few common e-mail addresses like sales@ support@ and billing@ for their public mail presence and the second - by invite only - domain for their real mail boxes?
 
The first domain will get a ton of Spam but will act like a switchboard with only a few select people having to review the messages and forward them internally to the people that will take action on them. The second domain will not accept e-mail from just any domain so it will be very easy to track down the source of any "Spammy" messages and stop them.
 
What do you think? Have you thought of or implemented a 'walled city' plan for your e-mail? Let us know in the comments.
 
- Shaun