My contention is that spam is largely a social, not a technical, issue.
The reason spam exists is that it is cost effective for the spammers. A
certain small percentage of people who receive spam respond to it, and that
response is sufficient to drive further spamming. If we spent as much
effort in educating the public about the pitfalls of responding to
unsolicited commercial email as we do in thinking up ways to block it, we
could probably make the problem go away on its own.
In effect, those few who bite at the bait spam offers are as responsible
for the spam problem as the spammers themselves. I think an international
campaign aimed at them would be at least as effective as all this technical
end-running we're doing. In the long haul, it's difficult for me to see
how any technical solution can represent more than a temporary setback for
the spammers. They're getting increasingly savvy and they're driven by the
clear economic gain they're deriving from their actions. We can never
successfully subvert that by filtering. We have to attack the root of the
problem, which is that spam pays. Stop that payout, and you stop spam. No
one sends out spam on the scale we're seeing just because they feel like
it. They do it because in the end they make money off the process. They
make money off the process because a small minority of the people who
receive spam respond to it by sending the spammers money. If we can modify
that behavior socially, we can reduce spam to a relative trickle that can
be more easily handled by technical means.
At least that's how it appears to me.
RGF
Robert G. Ferrell
rgferrell(_at_)direcway(_dot_)com
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