I can't see that working at all. As someone else has stated, spammers would just move to a spam friendly ISP. The only way to stop that from happening is to eliminate spam friendly ISPs from the internet, which would be a masterpiece in foreign relations, were it to happen. And if that *were* to happen, then the sliding scale would be pointless anyway.

The root cause of spam could be attributed to the (mislaid) trust in which the original developers of email protocols such as SMTP thought it would be used. The genie is out of the bottle.

As I see it, the current method of constantly battling spam through filtering and adminstrative actions is the only currently viable option. To completely eliminate spam, one of the following would have to happen;

1) The entire planet would need to come together in global peace, and submit itself to one legislative body that had the authority to string spammers up with Cat5. I guess that by the time that happens, we'll be dealing with alien-orginated spam anyway
2) The smtp protocol gets superceded by one that *requires* strong authentication of the originator in order to deliver the message. The problem with this is that it puts too much power in the authenticating body, which is likely to be subverted by government and/or big business for their own ends.

I can't see the problem going anyway anytime soon, and it's unfortunate that Big Business has to be blamed for a lot of the problem. Two examples;

About 6 months ago my ISP changed my email domain from mediaone.net to attbi.com. I rarely had any spam before that happened. Within a week, and before I had forwarded my new email address to friends/relatives (I had been out of town), I saw multiple spam messages to the new address. Disconcertingly, the headers showed that all the recipients were attbi.com customers, and all within a very narrow alphabetical list.. ie if my email was [email protected], all the recipients would lie in the range of eg [email protected] and [email protected]. This suggests to me that the recipient list was merely a subset of the entire attbi.com subscriber list, and that someone in attbi.com had either intentionally sold the list or had unintentionally made it publically accessible - neither of which is acceptable.

Despite that, my spam count remained relatively low (2-3 a week) up to about a month ago, when a friend emailed me from a hotmail account. Overnight, the spam increased, and is currently at about 5 a day. Hotmail has been shown to be suspect before - their 'privacy' protection only extends to their subscribers, and not to anyone that their subscribers may email. Try setting up a pristine email account, and sending only one message to it from a hotmail account..

Both of these spam issues have been caused by Big Business...