John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com> wrote:
I have to agree with Dave and Keith. This is an arms race, it
is driving the costs of email up, increasing concentration of
actors and raising privacy risks, and driving diversity down.
Spam-carried malware and phishing attacks continue to do real
damage including leading identity theft.
+++++
In an odd way, all of that mostly-effective filtering has the
side effect that there isn't enough spam getting through: the
only way to actually stop the arms race is to treat spamming as
a seriously anti-social activity and spammers as criminals and
parts of criminal enterprises.
Umm... I disagree.
Spam is not a contry-by-country problem. It is world-wide.
We are better able to address world-wide problem than any
individual contry's legislature (least of all the US Congress!).
As long as legislators and regulators see very little spam themselves,
efforts to get effective laws and enforcement actions are likely to be
ineffective,
For US legislators, at least, _none_ of them deal with spam as
part of their regular email process. They have staffers which _may_
read an actual email account: the legislator couldn't possibly read
all their "ham" from probable-constituents.
especially while self-defined "legitimate email marketers" continue
to press for weak laws and regulations to be sure their activities
are not constrained.
This is true. (and the "email marketers" contribute to re-election
campaign funds, while spam-receivers mostly don't).
From that point of view, if we really wanted to stop spam, there is
one thing we could do that might be effective and that has not been
tried: we could try to organize an international Spam Impact day
(or week) and persuade everyone to shut down their filters for that
period.
An interesting idea!!
I don't think such persuasion would be likely to succeed but, if it
did, I think it is safe to assume that many actors in the political
arena would decide it was time to Do Something.
Even if they did, how could enough legislators agree what to do???
BTW, I carefully read the entire 300-page document before replying.
There are interesting ideas there -- not that we could simply
standardize this document -- but pieces for which we could standardize
an underlying structure. I'd be happy to work on something of that order.
(I have had no luck so far getting a consensus to work on anything like
that.)
--
John Leslie <john(_at_)jlc(_dot_)net>
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