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Re: Why spam is a problem.

2002-08-14 04:00:20
Perry writes:

If electronic mail is to continue as a viable
communications medium, we have to stop this
problem, and soon.

One "solution" is to bill Internet users for every e-mail they send.  I
don't especially like the idea, since the actual cost of sending e-mail is
extremely low, but the only way to stop spammers is to make it too expensive
for them to send spam.  I'm not sure how this would be implemented
technically.  Also, I'm certain that, once implemented, it would be picked
up _and_ abused by everyone wanting to make a quick buck (perhaps even by
former spammers), and so you'd be paying 100 times more for e-mail than it
actually costs.  Another problem with this solution is that it would only be
implemented by sites that are already rejecting spam relays for the most
part, anyway; primitive Third-World sites--the ones with open relays--would
not be billing at all.  And the whole notion would smack of further
surveillance and interference with Internet traffic.

Another "solution" would be to stop replying to spam.  You may not reply to
it, and I don't, but it only takes a very small percentage of recipients
responding to make spam cost-effective (since the cost of sending it is
almost nil), and as long as someone responds, spam is viable.  If nobody
answered at all, however, it would be a waste of time.  Unfortunately,
getting _everyone_ to stop responding to spam isn't really a realistic goal.

Neither of these "solutions" is really that satisfactory.  I'm not sure what
else can be done.

FWIW, I receive several hundred spam messages a day.  I find that if I set
aside every message over about 10K in size, and every message not addressed
directly to me, and every message with HTML or other MIME types in it, I
catch a large part of the spam.  But I still have to clean out a hundred
messages or so a day myself.  Fortunately it's not hard; spam is really easy
to recognize just by the title line in 99.9% of all cases.  For the
questionable cases, I use the File | Properties dialog in Outlook Express to
examine the original message and see if it is worth opening (this avoids any
risk of viruses--I have OE set to the Restricted zone and the preview pane
is turned off, and the Restricted zone is _really_ restricted on my
machine).



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