Any way to deal with spam?

[Reiver_Fluffi]

Personally, I have a mail only hosting account, hence no website. The only people I give my address to is friends, family, and other contacts in real life. Any sites I do give my email address to are usually trusted, i.e. amazon, etc. Similarly if I do use the address to register at a site, I check that my address is reasonably well hidden from everyday users (hence why I am not fond of mailman lists, too much transparency IMHO).

 

In my opinion, spam is is just like viruses, phishing, etc that have grown exponentially with the increase in computers connected to the internet. Why, well it's obvious, computers have been increasingly been made available to more people of various incomes and aptitudes. Not everyone connected to the net, is net savvy, the spammers know this, and this is how their "business" grows. The best way forward is heavy regulation, but unfortunately the net is essentially borderless, hence we would need all governments working together on this....given the more important issues in the world, like poverty in third world countries, this is not likely to get any priority any time soon.

[javaguy]

Government control of the Internet would be a far worse problem than spam could ever be.

 

I'm happy with SpamAssassin. I still get about a dozen spams a day, and my Delete key takes care of those.

[Floyd]

javaguy

Government control of the Internet would be a far worse problem than spam could ever be.

I agree 100%.

Imho regulation always diminishes innovation.

edit:2007-02-22 12:04 est

...then again maybe regulation encourages innovation. Either way I still believe regulation the greater of two evils.

Edited February 22, 2007 by Floyd

[Reiver_Fluffi]

I'm not talking about regulating the net as a whole, I am talking about detering those that use it to spam and generally cause a nuisance. Spam has consequences other than dropping in your mailbox. It has consequences for network traffic that hinders not just you, but other users of the local or wide area network. We already have some government regulation concerning buying and selling on the internet, this is merely to protect buyers and sellers, not about controlling them, and it works well!

Edited February 23, 2007 by Reiver_Fluffi

[javaguy]

Like it or not, spam is free speech.

 

Proposed legislation to regulate spam has absolutely nothing to do with regulating spam. It is simply an attempt to establish a legal precedent that the government can dictate what we are and are not allowed to say on the Internet. Once that precedent has been set, the government's feigned interest in spam with vanish as it turns its attention to more vital forms of expression that it would like to quash.

[tyme]

Proposed legislation to regulate spam has absolutely nothing to do with regulating spam. It is simply an attempt to establish a legal precedent that the government can dictate what we are and are not allowed to say on the Internet. Once that precedent has been set, the government's feigned interest in spam with vanish as it turns its attention to more vital forms of expression that it would like to quash.

Please tread carefully in this direction of the topic, as it takes the topic into a direction of political opinion and debate, which is not permitted here (we'd have to split it to OTW).

[neddie]

Relax, I'm not suggesting governmental intervention or curtailment of free speech, nor am I suggesting passing all email traffic through a three-letter validation system before allowing it to be sent. I'm just thinking there should be (or might be already) a system whereby the large number of affected people can do something about it. We are the majority, after all, and collaboration and cooperation belong on the net.

 

As to poverty in third world countries, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but there are lots of issues less important than third world poverty which still get dealt with in some way. It's not as if spam-prevention systems exacerbate third world poverty. Plus, spam costs real money for companies and organisations everywhere - money to transfer the email, store it, manage it, the employees' time deleting it, and so on. So there are plenty of interested parties who could (and have already) make something happen.

 

The kind of thing I'd like to see is a place like Spamcop where spams can be freely and voluntarily reported. They already do this, gathering huge quantities of spam from individuals and from spam-trap email addresses. Then the idea is that they can manage a blocking list from repeated sources, and anyone who wants to (without regulation) could use that list to auto-delete spam. As I said though, for me it all gets a bit opaque after that because the exact same spam keeps coming.

 

Now you could take this further and make a report every now and again listing the biggest culprits - name and shame them, effectively. Share all the information with them of IP addresss and times, and ask them to do something about it. Then report on whether they actually did anything about it or not. I'm guessing that if you're an ISP and get listed as a prominent and irresponsible source of spam, that bad publicity could affect your image and therefore whether people choose to be your customer or not. Let the market make the decisions, without government regulation.

 

Second, use the information to help the spam filters get better - raise the weights of emails from known sources for example. This is probably already being done, but it would be nice to do this further upstream if possible. Maybe do that handshaking greylisting thing for mails from listed sources, but I guess that could get too problematic.

 

Third, for emails promoting websites, collect the information and feed it to a browser plugin. I think this is already done for known phishing sites, but the same applies - have the browser popup a message saying "this website is associated with large spamming campaigns. Are you sure you want to contribute to your own spam flood by accessing this site?" - dissuade people from visiting the sites and encourage the site owners to stop spamming. And for those who scream "nanny state!" - the plugin isn't required, you can just choose to be informed about that if you want to. Or make it default and disableable. And yes you're right, the tech-savvy Firefox users probably aren't the ones clicking the ads, but there might be a way to do something similar for the XP/IE7 crowd too.

 

Just some thoughts, I was hoping someone here knew of such a thing already but it sounds like not.