Comment Re:What must be done (Score 2, Insightful) 375
You are absolutely right. The problem is highly asymmetrical : the spammer needs spambots and webservers worth a few thousand $, and can flood the Internet with crap. If every recipient is to spend a few minutes to do a mDOS (manual denial of service), it sums up to tens of millions of lost minutes, or millions of $ in lost productivity.
We need an automated descentralized P2P network to attack the spammers and the spam-friendly ISPs.
It takes me less than 5 minutes to forward the 5000-7000 emails in my catchall account each day. I use Thunderbird with the Blue Frog plugin, and forward about 400 messages at a time - I could do it all in a minute if I could attach all the messages at once but that ends up to be too large a message...
Doing it manually would take *far* longer - I've enough time sinks as it is!
According to my Blue Security statistics, my Blue Frog has sent 11,152 "opt-out" requests in the past 7 days. (which also points out that every spam doesn't generate an opt-out) Blue Security's idea is to be enough of a thorn that it's easier to not send to the Blue Frog list than to fight it. (one of the spammer tools has recently added a "clean emails of Blue Security registered names" button - making it trivially easy to remove the registered names. This implies that Blue Security is having an effect.
Right now there are 471,000 names in the list - surely not all are really active, and not all are sending opt-out messages, but it seems spammers are sitting up and noticing now. According to Blue Security's blog, in the past month several spammers have negotiated with them and agreed to clean their lists. If I remember right they generate something like 8% or so of spam volume. Not a *lot* but I'd expect more in the coming months. Spammers are in it to make money - once they get over the initial irritation, it'll just be easier to clean their lists than to try to fight back. Which also makes sense - the list is people who won't buy from them in the first place, so in the end it's a waste of time to send spam to them.
In my opinion (everyone's got em! :) this is the best shot I've seen at drastically reducing spam. Laws aren't as helpful as they could be - especially against spam from other countries. And it takes a long time to catch and convict a single spammer. Do you *really* want your tax dollars used that way? (we don't even need to get into how gosh-darn *wonderful* CAN-SPAM is...) Filters help, but that's not stopping the spam, it's just preventing you from seeing it. Killing spammers might have an effect but seems a bit severe. (although there are days... :) Baysian filters help - but a business can't lose a mail to false positives, so they need to check the spam anyway. Challenge-response is ugly and annoying. And I sure don't want to go down the pay-for-email road! RBLs are too dangerous - throwing out the good with the bad. (one listed the entire Comcast.net domain, for example) Greylisting isn't a bad idea, but it does use extra computing power, and delays some email. Seems to me that being a thorn in the side of a spammer has a decent chance of working. They're not stupid, not even necessarily lazy. They're just taking advantage of the way things work. (excepting those who use trojans etc to take over other's machines - they're evil!) Once they reach the point where it's easier to accept and comply, and recognize they're not losing any revenue (because those emails won't become customers anyway) they'll clean their lists - and spam will go down. It won't disappear, but hopefully be significantly reduced.
- Al Weiner -
We need an automated descentralized P2P network to attack the spammers and the spam-friendly ISPs.
It takes me less than 5 minutes to forward the 5000-7000 emails in my catchall account each day. I use Thunderbird with the Blue Frog plugin, and forward about 400 messages at a time - I could do it all in a minute if I could attach all the messages at once but that ends up to be too large a message...
Doing it manually would take *far* longer - I've enough time sinks as it is!
According to my Blue Security statistics, my Blue Frog has sent 11,152 "opt-out" requests in the past 7 days. (which also points out that every spam doesn't generate an opt-out) Blue Security's idea is to be enough of a thorn that it's easier to not send to the Blue Frog list than to fight it. (one of the spammer tools has recently added a "clean emails of Blue Security registered names" button - making it trivially easy to remove the registered names. This implies that Blue Security is having an effect.
Right now there are 471,000 names in the list - surely not all are really active, and not all are sending opt-out messages, but it seems spammers are sitting up and noticing now. According to Blue Security's blog, in the past month several spammers have negotiated with them and agreed to clean their lists. If I remember right they generate something like 8% or so of spam volume. Not a *lot* but I'd expect more in the coming months. Spammers are in it to make money - once they get over the initial irritation, it'll just be easier to clean their lists than to try to fight back. Which also makes sense - the list is people who won't buy from them in the first place, so in the end it's a waste of time to send spam to them.
In my opinion (everyone's got em!
- Al Weiner -
