We, meaning industry and society, are overlooking the most obvious and effective solution to e-mail spam, as discussed in your recent article "Mounting Volume of Junk Defies Filters, Delete Keys" (ENR 2/25 p. 33). Our current approach is a losing battle for several reasons.
First, we'll never keep spam at bay with technology. The spammers will match any technological breakthrough with their own technological answers. Second, as long as spammers have free access to hundreds of millions of business and consumer e-mails, they have an extraordinarily powerful incentive to keep up. Third, the resolution of the Cold War you used as an analogy was not technological, it was economically based.