to let them know that you are actually reading their crap, even just to the extent of trying to get rid of it.

It's like the "Do Not Track" flag in browsers or the "Do Not Call" phone registry (that was harvested by scammers to find new targets.)

Best thing is to get a ever-growing list of spammers in your email client/server. Just like the "Block Caller" for phones and text messages.

What would solve almost all of these problems would be a charge per message sent per customer. I'd say that an email/txt/phone provider would allow for example:
- 1,000 messages sent per month free as part of the plan
- Every additional message would be $0.05 - payable to the provider and used decrease subscriber costs.

Spammers send out multiple thousands of emails/txts/voice per day. That $0.05 would be a serious impact on their model.

still keep your info forever etc. but we need to do what we can to stop feeding the beast. I agree with you about the charge to use my equipment to market to me. But since the inception of the internet they have weaseled their way into having their ads/texts etc. to be the equivalent of a phone call or sending out junk mail. They did this of course while refusing to accept any of the regulations in place at the time regarding phone calls or mail. While they set in motion the massive fraud, identity theft and abuse we now see. I remember 20+ years ago when those of us concerned about such things kept getting told by elected officials and law enforcement "That's just the internet" and it was their excuse to do nothing and any attempts to get action on fraud were usually met with frustration. Not because they couldn't take action but because they wouldn't.

I used to point out that if a salesman physically walked through a neighborhood selling vacuum cleaners door to door and was discovered by the people to have been using a different name at several different homes you could have the cops easily show up and ask the guy about making false representations by using a fake name. But one person on the internet is allowed to take out thousands and thousands of e-mail identities with each purporting to be a different individual and law enforcement shrugs their shoulders and goes "it's just the internet" as though the medium for fraud being digital somehow makes it just a nuisance rather than a crime. They could have policed all of this way better early on but didn't and I firmly believe it wasn't just ignorance of what would come that held lawmakers back but money played a big part also. So here we are.

unless a rich person is hurt.

Edited to say: "and it's usually the rich people who are the cons."