damn_registrars's Journal: A meaningful reduction in spam? Not likely

On November 29th, a slashdot story was posted that asked whether spammers are giving up ( Are Spammers Giving Up?) I was one of several people who replied by saying that this is highly inlikely. Discussions ensued as to whether or not current actions that have been taken by end users are effective at stopping spam - to which I continue to argue "no".

This afternoon, I checked a mailbox for an email account that I haven't sent an email from in months. I looked only at email that was recieved with a sent date between November 21 and December 1. This was a total of 11 days. By going through this mailbox quickly in pine, and deleting based on subject lines, and occasionally body text, I deleted 482 messages that I didn't want. These were of course primarily offers for sexual enhancement products that I'm not interested in, with a sprinkling of illegal software offers sold under the "0EM" guise.

In short, my spam rate - excluding the messages that are stopped by the rules I set up in pine - is approximately 43 messages per day. I certainly wouldn't consider that a reduction.

As I've said before, spam will stop only when we cut out the economic incentive for it. Spammers are promoting products for sale. Even if the spammers themselves are not the salespeople, they are still getting a cut off the sales, or they wound't be doing it. When an economic shift occurs that makes it no longer profitable, we will see the spam problem at last reach an end.