Spam (not SPAM, the meat product) is worse in SMTP because it's the
protocol that allows the spammer to put the message in the face of
the target. Change the protocol without changing the very nature of
email, and spammers will still find ways to exploit it.
It's not just that. NNTP puts messages in the face of the target just
as much as SMTP does, but the spam problem on usenet, at least in the
big 8 groups, is negligible. Why? I'm not entirely sure. The fact
that every site sees all the traffic makes bulk-based cancelbots
possible, but they're technically not all that hard to circumvent as
hipcrime's occasional forays into nanae have shown. Does the
possibility of UDPs make usenet nodes behave more responsibly? Is it
just that there's so many more e-mail users that spammers don't bother
with usenet any more?
I don't use instant message or chat much, but it is my impression that
other than virusbots like fizzer, IRC doesn't have much of a spam
problem. Why not? I'd think that it wouldn't be hard to write
spamware that sprinkled messages all over IRC? Why don't we see much
instant message spam (at least relative to e-mail spam)? Is it that
the popular IM systems are all closed with a central control point?
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
http://www.taugh.com
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