Doug writes:
Do we have to solve *the* spam problem?
I'm beginning to think that it cannot be solved--not technically, and not
legally. One man's spam is another man's legitimate e-mail. It's like
censorship.
The hard problem is how to allow people to be
generally accessible by email, but not so accessible
that they get tons of spam. In other words, how they
can participate in a public forum -- say a newsgroup
or mailing list -- allowing other individuals to contact
them with non-spam, while keeping the spam out.
Agreed. Most spammers seem to pull addresses from newsgroups, discussion
forums, and Web sites. Addresses of mine that appear on none of these never
receive any spam.
While some would prefer to re-engineer the entire
Internet mail system, I just see that average users
would be happy if email from their relatives,
friends, co-workers, and acquaintances went into
one folder, while everything else went into another
folder, automatically.
I agree.
Why is that so hard to do?
It's not.
Why isn't it done?
Probably because the same people who might easily be able to use such a
system are not receiving spam, anyway, because their e-mail addresses are
invisible to spammers (they don't post to USENET, they have no Web sites,
they've never given their e-mail address to a Web site, and their e-mail
address is largely immune to a dictionary or exhaustive attack).