2) spam-till-you-drop.com pays the several hundred bucks a year, and receives a valid X.509 spam-till-you-drop.com certificate, enabling them to send "authenticated" mail.
My ISP can block spam-till-you-drop.com cert until they apply a good policy of use to their customers.
Or until spam-till-you-drop.com obtains a certificate for spam-till-you-drop2.com, which shouldn't take more than 24 hours, and you're back to square one.
3) The classification of each "authenticated" message is entirely up to the sender's discretion. If the sender believes that the message is a personal one-on-one communication, then that's what it is.
If X person sends bulk e-mail as personal he is lying, no matter what he believes the ISP have the final word. If the ISP is permissive block them!
That'll last only long enough for the sender to obtain a new cert. See above.
Imagine a law that punish the e-mail lie. AMTP permits law enforcement in a easily way.
And who gets to decide whether the sender lied about the nature of the message? Someone needs to make this call, and this is a purely subjective issue. The sender will simply swear on a stack of bibles that each one of the millions of messages they send is individually addressed, and its content is custom-tailored to the recipient's "business relationship" with the sender.
Now what?
... And if you base your definition of "bulk" purely on a numerical basis, it now becomes simply a matter of customizing each individual message sufficiently so that it becomes arguable whether the messages overall qualify as bulk.
pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
