Europe's Spam Ban Not Doing Much

from the not-a-legal-problem dept

Clearly, laws against spam do little to help. Many countries in Europe (and soon the whole EU) have laws that ban spam, but the spam just keeps on coming. The fact is that spammers come from all over, so they're often immune to various local laws. Even worse, is that they're nearly impossible to find. It's pretty clear that the solution to spam is going to have to be through technology (or universal enlightenment of the morons who spam, but that seems like a long shot...).
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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 5 Aug 2002 @ 6:56am

    No Subject Given

    Mike you poor misguided individual. Technology will never cure this problem. As soon as technology is created to battle it, spam will morph to circumvent the technology. You sound like a record company trying to stop MP3 distribution. The only thing that will really stop spam is your basic punishment of the spammers and given the lack of international/state borders for spam generation, it's a long way off. Til then, it's half assed measures at most and more companies getting rich saling/creating spam filters for various mail systems.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Mike (profile), 5 Aug 2002 @ 8:39am

      Re: No Subject Given

      From what I've heard, between SpamCop, SpamAssassin and CloudMark, you can wipe out an awful lot of spam thanks to technology. Also whitelist solutions like ChoiceMail, sound like they could help wipe out spam as well. I don't think most spammers think they'll ever get caught, no matter what the punishment is, so i'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind your argument.

      Feel free to explain in more detail, though, because I'm probably missing your point.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        Anonymous Coward, 6 Aug 2002 @ 7:12am

        Re: No Subject Given

        Technology can only work so well and if there's a desire, it will be circumvented. It's only when people want it to work that it's effective. To the people distributing the SPAM, it's too valuable for them to let technology thwart them. There are many SPAM filters out there which are actually pretty effective, however, as in the case of MacSlash, they can be TOO effective. I think anything developed will be at best 90% effective, and only if people take the time to make it work that 90% of the time. What needs to happen is some kind of disciplinary action against the spammer. People understand loss of money or being sent to jail and it's that risk outweighing the reward that will get the SPAM down to zero. Not technology.

        link to this | view in chronology ]


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