I've even see Drudge starting to post headlines with the words Global Warming NOT in sarcastic scare quotes. One of these days, Mark Steyn may even stop referring to it as "hooey" - at which point hell will freeze over and our climate problems will be solved.

...is to make it uneconomical.

Here's my back-of-an-envelope proposal:

A "postage stamp" cost of 1 cent (or local equivalent) for every email sent outside your home domain.

This money is collected by your ISP, and forwarded to ICANN and the other internet control bodies to pay for the infrastructure that underpins our online lives.

Since the 1c "postage" is only collected for email sent outside your domain, companies don't have to pay for internal email.

Since it's only 1c, it's at worst a tiny annoyance for legitimate email users (i.e. all of us) but would make spam totally uneconomical. A 1-million email spam burst would cost $10,000.

Yes it would raise the cost of running "I agree that you can tell me all about your new products!" email lists, but that's another positive, because it would drive legitimate users of such lists to correctly target them (i.e. I get no more ads for new ranges of bath towels from BBB).

Kindly respond, stating your acceptance to this notification and we shall give you more information on this program

Did you respond? You should respond and state your acceptance to see what they send you/ask you for next. They haven't asked for anything they can use against you and it'd be interesting to see what they do end up asking for. In addition, you might want to let the legitimate companies know how their names are being used.