Spam? No thank you, m'am
- 30 January, 2010 08:53
- Comments 2
I don't know about you, but beautiful Russian girls are just dying to meet me. They're all 26 years old, most of them are named Olga, and from their descriptions they sound totally hot. But first I have to buy a fantastic luxury timepiece, change my Facebook login, get a bucketful of knockoff prescriptions, and pick up that parcel waiting for me at UPS or DHL (even though I never ordered anything).
Yes, spam is ruling my life these days. My inbox is overflowing with it. Amazingly, it seems to have gotten worse since the last time I ranted about it, if that's possible.
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And yes, I use multiple spam filters. So does my Web host, my ISP, and (I'm certain) my ISP's upstream providers. I'm sure they're catching 95 percent of the crap. But 5 percent of 250 billion emails sent each day is still quite a lot of crap.
Back in October I asked the residents of Cringeville what they would do to fix the spam problem. And I got a number of very good responses. Why am I just writing about it now? Because -- irony alert -- those responses were all trapped in my (ahem) spam folder, which I clean out about as often as my sock drawer (about once a decade).
So I dug through it and found messages from several Cringesters with the same good idea: Make email expensive to send in large amounts. Here's C. D.'s scheme:
My best bet is for a robust, maybe token-based, validated email system that (gulp!) costs money like a stamp to send email. At a fraction of a penny per email, I don't think anyone should balk at having to pay a buck or two per month extra to clean things up. Maybe this is validated through ISPs, so it's more transparent to end users? Maybe our illustrious USPS could get savvy enough to make it happen and keep from going bankrupt?
A penny or two for an individual isn't a deal breaker -- think of what people pay for texting packages!
I like this scheme, though I'd modify it slightly -- let you send the first 500 or so emails for free, or only charge for email sent to more than, say, 50 or 100 people at once. That should let casual users off the hook and make commercial users carry the load (as it should be).
But it will never fly. Why? Because of what I call "legal spammers" -- ad agencies and online marketers who fill our inboxes with solicitations for actual products, whether or not we've asked for them. They've spent millions making sure most of the antispam laws on the books are toothless.
The other problem? When the spammers phish your account and suddenly you're on the hook for their marketing bills. Cringester J. L. B. is less than sympathetic to your plight, though:
When Joe Clueless starts receiving $200 bills from his ISP because of all those spams he's unwittingly sending us, maybe he'll start paying attention to security.
Other Cringe readers offered technical solutions -- like encouraging ISPs to employ Sender Policy Framework and use Reverse MX lookups to spot forged sender addresses.
Regular commentor ticedoff8 suggests we hand over our email systems to a third party so that they can enforce anti-spam rules:
To solve this problem, someone has to "own" the routing and transport system. This new system would have to be secure and require some form of authorization to access (put mail into the pipe). ...This "owner" of this new transport & routing system would establish criteria for relationships with ISPs. If the ISP violates their contracts - boom, the hammer drops and the ISP is cut off.
As he (she?) notes, you'd have to give up notions of a free and open Internet and Net neutrality to make such a system work. And then there's the possibility of somebody just bribing their way onto that third party's permanent whitelist.
Dedicated anti-spammers like Spamhaus's Steve Linford have spent years negotiating with tier-one and tier-two backbone providers, trying to persuade them to shut down known spamming operations. And he's been amazingly successful.
The problem? There's too much money for many of them to turn down -- literally millions a month in bandwidth charges. Spammers who get booted just move to another provider or set up shop under a different name, so it becomes a constant game of whack-a-mole. And then there's the thriving black market of Web hosts and bandwidth providers who specialize in providing safe haven to the scum of the Internet.
I suppose if this were an easy nut to crack we'd all be eating peanuts by now -- and enjoying a spam-free Internet.
Last time out I suggested sentencing spammers to some quality time in a maximum security cell with an ex-biker named "Tiny." But I think that's too good for these people. They should be strung up by their thumbs and forced to watch ShamWow infomercials and Rick Astley videos until their ears bleed.
Are you with me? Who wants to take pitchforks and torches to the homes of the world's worst spammers? Vote aye or nay below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.
This story, "Spam? No thank you, m'am," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.
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Comments
Anonymous
NO!
I will disagree with the idea of "charging" for email - you start charging and ISPs will start looking at as ways to make more money and will gradually run up the bill. I already spend a chunk of my money on Internet Service ... they take care of 95% of the spam its up to me to do the rest and EDUCATE myself on how to avoid it.
Maybe a solution would be having ISP's / Email providers require a training course a couple times a year teaching the user how to secure their mail and be more responsible. Simply charging wont work ... you have kids that have emails, people that send out resumes - yeah give them another bill and charge late fees if they just don't have the money ...
Sorry but charging wont fix the problem.
Carl S. Gutekunst
The "sender pays" model has been around for at least 20 years; it was fundamental to some of the design assumptions for X.400, which was built to accommodate PTT's that changed for network traffic by the packet. As a solution for spam, it has two serious flaws.
First, no one has come up with a viable way to implement "sender pays" for E-mail. That was one of the issues that bogged down X.400, even though it was a design assumption. Trying to retrofit that into SMTP is likely infeasible.
Second, there's millions of botted machines out there, nearly every one owned by a different person. Even ignoring that few of them are in the U.S. (Friday I was watching a botnet that was using machines in Iran, Thailand, Italy, and Romania), sending all of their owners $200 bills for E-mail overages will only crush their customer service departments. This just doesn't scale.
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