Spam Lives
from the forever dept
An article telling us what we all know already (unfortunately). Spam messages are like cockroaches. You can't kill them. The article points out that the industry isn't really doing anything to police itself (despite what they say) and most spammers aren't really a part of any "industry" anyway. It's nice that the FTC is "cracking down" on spam, but really they're just sending mean angry letters to spammers. Basically, he's saying that we're just going to have to suck it up and deal with all this spam. I'm not yet so pessimistic, but I'll admit it's not looking good.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
You can kill cockroaches
Supposidly spam is protected by free speech. Yet there are laws against sending unsolicted spam faxes, so why doesn't the 1st Ammendment apply to them?
Anyway can a programmer exercise their free speech by writing software to filter out and trash spam before it even reaches the recipient's inbox? Then the programmer can exercise their right to free enterprize by selling the spam killing app to ISP's and those running their own servers.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: You can kill cockroaches
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: You can kill cockroaches
Well, duh! That is why the person was advocating summarily trashing spam coming from off shore. Evenstill, it isn't someone in a developing country sending the spam, it is some jerk in the USA, spam just passes through off shore servers to avoid legal threats.
Ya wanna see something happen about off shore spam. Wait until some nut case brings down important servers such as military or infrastucture service by mail bombing them from off shore. Politicians don't seem to care about John Q. Public until they suffer the same condition.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Only ~100% effective solution so far
Phillip.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Only ~100% effective solution so far
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
White lists
Yes, better to have it held on the server and then you approve the messages. As to filters, also trash sight unseen anything that is routed through foriegn servers, spammers seem to like open relays in developing countries.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]