> From: Paul Vixie <vixie(_at_)vix(_dot_)com>
> the IETF debated whether it should do anything about spam and chose
> "no"
I used to think this was the right thing, but I've changed my mind.
The reason is that I think all these legal measures are a complete waste of
time. The spammers who are determined to send you stuff will simply move
overseas to jurisdictions which don't care about spam (those that aren't
already there, that is - I get a lot of spam in Asian alphabets I can't even
read). All these US laws are interesting, but ultimately a waste of time.
And if you think that there are going to be international agreements to stop
spam, you need only to look at the difficulty law enforcement agencies are
having getting international cooperation to act against outright fraud
(credit card theft, identity theft, etc) coming from some jurisdictions. The
Washington Post had a good series of stories about this recently.
The *only* thing that's going to stop spam is charging for email. Everything
else is a waste of time, because you're going to run into impossible
arguments trying to define what's spam, and what's legitimate bulk email
(q.v. the recent message about IETF-Announce email).
Needless to say, charging for email means changing the underlying protocols.
That's us. It's not going to be simple (we need an underlying micro-payments
system), and it's going to take a lot of attention to detail (q.v.
IETF-Announce again), but I think it's the only real cure.
Noel