Fw: Unsolicited commercial email (was [ILUG] Europe chickens out of

[niall at linux.ie]

> On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 12:36:04PM -0400, Ruairi Newman mentioned:
> > E-mail is the easiest form of communication from which to opt out.
> > Recipients need only press reply and type "unsubscribe". We could
> 
>  Problem being that most "spammers" consider an "unsubscribe" to be a sign
> of an active email account, which they can then sell for a higher price,
> so most knowledgeable email users will not do this.

Of course Kate was right here, and I never will unsubscribe to these poxy
things, but as spammers are going to win this battle, why not try to win it on
our terms ? Spammers insist that they never want to send spam to those who don't
want to receive it, so how about a "I don't want no steenking spam, never, no
way, no how" register. This would be centrally administered, paid for of course
by spammers.

Of course I see some immediate problems :-( If the modus operandi is that
spammers get the list and must filter against it, then no doubt many will just
use that list as a source of email addresses, which is rather self defeating.
Another alternative might be to allow spammers to send their spam and the list
of addresses to a central spam re-distributor, which filters against the list
which it holds. 

Yet another approach would be to not have any list, but simply to make it
obligatory to send spam through the distributor, thus giving spammers a cost.
This is of course why this will never work :-(

A further idea is to oblige spammers to send a special spam indicating  header -
maybe as simple as the current precedence, but instead of bulk we might use
shite or something else appropriate. Then we could easily filter it, and sending
spam without this header would be an offence.

So, lots of nice easy ways to stop spam, none of which have much more than a
snowball's chance in hell of being adopted IMHO.


A pessimistic Niall