I was Joe Jobbed again this weekend.

The Joe Job was named for its original victim, a man named Joe Doll of Joes.Com. It means your e-mail address is forged as the "from" address for a spam e-mailing, and you get the bounces.

Sourceforge has an excellent discussion of all this, and reasons why many solutions from individuals don't work, here. The illustration is taken from that discussion. It shows how a "challenge-response" system used by an individual actually increases the cost of spam to everyone.

Today I want to describe the first part of killing this hassle for innocent users, which falls especially hard on those, like me, who have long-lived e-mail addresses and a history of writing against spam.

Don't do a DNS look-up for your bounce. Bounce back to the first referring IP number in the address.

None of the Joe Jobs done on me have used the IP address for a-clue.com as the sending agency. They have used either the actual account held by the spammer at the time or the address of the spam zombie used to originate the mail.

This bounce procedure, then, would help locate zombies so they can be cleaned-up.

There is a risk in this, of course. It would be just as easy for someone to forge an IP address on an e-mail as it would be an address. It's possible, even likely, that spammers would start using the from addresses of known e-mailers, like my friends at Whitehat, as their own "from" addresses.

But at least these folks are professionals who might be able to assist people in their investigations.

Another trick to avoid detection would be the creation of random IP addresses as senders.

At that point we could go to Phase Two. Once a specific sending threshold is reached (say 10,000 in the list) senders would have to verify their own addresses before the e-mail would go out. ISPs would send a single e-mail to the IP address sending the message, and would not send to the list until they got a response.

I'm certain I'll get a lot of notes back saying none of this will ever work. I always do when proposing anti-spam solutions. I'll keep trying.