The corollary of the funding capture issue isthat the only way for an anti-spam scheme involving money to work is forthe people receiving email to pay for it; only then are the economicinterests kept aligned. Naturally this is not very popular with peoplegetting spammed, which helps to explain the enduring popularity ofproposed schemes where someone else pays.

Unfortunately, this creates a perverse incentive that's familiarfrom the anti-virus world: if spam goes away, so do the anti-spamorganizations. Their

Once upon a time, we had a machine that wound up with a default routethat pointed straight to the local network, basically what you'd get ifyou did route add default dev eth0 .

(Disclaimer: I have no idea if your system would actually accept that route command or if it would demand a gateway.)

That this worked to some degree is not too surprising in retrospect;there actually is a straightforward meaning to this, namely to arp for alldestinations on the local Ethernet, and that