For me it is frustrating because my political satire emails are lost in a sea of SPAM. Now that we have a law against SPAM people sometimes take the position that it is illegal for me to send them satire without permission.

Yet Senator McCain recently observed that email and talk radio are good for democracy. This is an idea that I agree with, even though talk radio is repugnant to my ear.

Make corporations pay a mill for each email, and see how quick they stop.

o Have a DNS spam list which equests forwarding of all email which is from the blacklisted source IP address.

o Scan all email forwarded and consolidate all of it which matches the spam which prompted the listing.

o Law time. Get the money. Make sure that the law punishes those advertising and allows seizing funds held by money transfer systems.

o Distribute 50% of the proceeds to every person who reported the spam in response to the DNS listing.

o Consolidate payments as required so people see real money for passing on real spam.

The key technical componnents for this already exist. Time for the law to enable it.

Junk faxing is less amenable to this technical/legal solution because it’s not trivially easy to consolidate junk fax reports. It is trivial to consolidate spam reports.

Excellent Blog.

I have chosen to use the EMACS editor for the first time to create this post. Please forgive any typos or misspellings that arize from this choice.

Forgive my simple minded approach to this problem, but could you not arrange to meter outbound SMTP Traffic and begin message taxing after a specific message threashold had been reached?

Simple threashold models might include:

Domain Based Example:

Outbound Message Threashold Per IP.
.gov = unlimited
.mil = unlimited
.net = 1000 messages/day
.com = 500 messages/day
.org = 500 messages/day
.biz = 500 messages/da
Non registered IPs = 100 messages/day

Obviously, graduated or other non-class putative models would need to be considered.

I do not believe that there would be a technology barrier. The business case would make ISPs responsible for payment of the duty to the government. A quick look at the U.S. Constitution seems to indicate Congress could empower say, the Post Office to collect and enforce this duty, possibly with and incentive commission to the ISP.

In my own perverse way, I sort of like spam, thus controlling it through economic (Kensyan) methods seems to me to be the best way out. If you want to get to my eyeballs, you got to pay somebody. This could keep the Post Office from raising my letter rate (na).

Kindest Regards,

Paul Flint

Many people have criticised those who criticise DNSBL systems. From my own experience http://www.info-world.com/spam.diagnosis it is apparent that DNSBL is leading to the breakdown of communications. It is also totally unnecessary – yes unnecessary. I run a modified version of SpamAssassin on my client’s server which rejects 99.99% of all spam and false positives are less than 0.1%. Please email me and I will give you the details of the dumping box where users of the system can check up occasionally just to make sure.

Whilst labelling of emails from DNS blacklisted addresses has a potentially useful function, DNS blocking should be made illegal. Those responsible for the blacklists make mistakes and often the effects cause inconvenience to many thousands of people.

Suddenly without warning, I was unable to receive communications from Spain and my clients there had to resort to opening up hotmail accounts and sending by snailmail. DNS blocking is wholly unnecessary, causes enormous disruption, inconvenience and loss of time and is only used by lazy and stupid ISPs who cannot be bothered to apply the existing free software technology with a little intelligence.

Yours sincerely

David Pinnegar BSc ARCS

If we were to short-circuit that, perhaps by using SMTP auth and an X.509 certificate for the client instead of accepting relay from a block of IP addresses, the single most exploited method of sending spam would be shut down.

Granted, getting enough service providers on board to implement such a system is next to impossible, but this seems to be another situation where there’s a perfectly good technical solution to the problem that will die on the vine due to ISP resistance.

cheers.

-travis

There is already a law against bulk unsolicited commercial faxes. Why can’t the idiots in Congress and/or the state legislatures simply extend that well-established law to include bulk unsolicited commercial emails?

There is already a law against bulk unsolicited commercial faxes. Why can’t the idiots in Congress and/or the state legislatures simply extend that well-established law to include bulk unsolicited commercial emails?

As a number of posted comments have suggested, the legal controls on SPAM (let’s say a “simple labelling requirement,” but it could be something else) must be enforceable against the companies whose products and services are marketed via electronic mail. This should make anti-spam laws easier to enforce. If we make the sellers pay a substantial penalty for non-compliance and force them to disgorge gross revenues from e-mail related sales, there will be incentives to ensure that their e-mail marketing campaigns are conducted properly.

Think of it as demand management for SPAM….