resurepus's Journal: The cure for spam

I was browsing through slashdot's pages and I have come across Robin 'Roblimo' Miller's home page roblimo.com He is a slashdot's author and he is obviously getting his email address exposed too much. Well, there are cons of working for slashdot, right?

But he is bravely fighting against all these guys who try to sell him free porn, viagra and pennis enlargement pills. I do receive a lot of unwanted emails too (right, we all do) and so far I haven't found an effective way to block them. In the very introduction Robin states "I am forced to charge $50 for each unsolicited bulk email I receive, plus an additional $50 fee per email for HTML or attachments, charged on your behalf to your ISP if you do not pay within 30 days or, in the case of non-US companies or individuals, to your country's US embassy."

This is very inspiring! Looks like we have found the cure for all these Nigerian emails! Being a Russian myself I could make a living (an average salary here in Kostroma, Russia is about $100 a month) by simply charging the senders of the bulk emails. But I am really interested to hear if this really works. I would really appreciate if Robin shared his experience in fighting against spam and telling us more about the process of charging the fee. I don't think I am the only one who wants to hear this, you know it too well that everybody has to deal with the problem every day.

I would also like to know if it helps in any way to send claims to the local US Embassy.

stopping spam

[FaultMachine]

honestly, nothing will stop people from sending you emails to get you "free high school diploma" until a law says they can't. So far the only proposals I've heard were not even to stop spam, but make spammers attach some sort prefix to the subject like "ADDVERTISMENT."

Re:stopping spam

[resurepus]

I absolutely agree with this. And actually what I was trying to say is that Roblimo's message is not going to scare spammers away for 2 reasons: 1.there's no way he could charge $50 for each email he receives. 2.it's usually a robot who collects email addresses from webpages and normally robots are not that easy to scare.