, The Register 2004-07-07
Delegates at an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) spam conference this week have called for standardised, stronger worldwide anti-spam legislation. They aim control the 'modern day epidemic' of spam within two years.
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I find your lack of faith disturbing.
"2) The US Constitution guarantees the right to free speech and the freedom of press. Email must in theory be very similar to either one or the other. While I do not like spam, what's to say that someone will eventually get sued for emailing someone else, when it was not spam? It's just as much their right to spam as it is my right to filter it out."
U.S. legal code says that if I don't want to hear about it, I don't have to. Telemarketing, which is related, lost its case using the "Free speech" arguement. This is like arguing that I have a constitutional right to call your daughter at 3AM to tell you about all the hot and horny grandmas that want to make her dreams come true.
"3) There have already been several wonderful solutions to spam. Are our lawmakers this ignorant? All the major three (Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL) email providers have had antispam built into them for as long as I can remember. There are several very good anti-spam software packages out there, SpamAssassin being my favorite. I've had a military email account for four years and never gotten spam. Even a generic Outlook Express can be configured to filter out email based on criteria. John Q. Dvorak suggested that a better idea would be for ISP's to charge based on total number of email sent, and/or based on total bandwidth, which would in theory drive spammers out of business due to the costs associated. Are our lawmakers ignorant, or are they being pressured or bribed into signing off on anti-spam legislature?"
There are several methods of questionable efficiency for mitigating the effects of spam. The filters on most popular sites get rid of most of it, but not all of it, and thats the problem. One email telling me that my penis is too small that gets through filters is one too many, and the fact that a lot of legitimate mail gets caught up is a pain in the ass. If you've never lost an important communication because its been flagged as spam, your lucky. This is particularly arduous when you choose to either dig through several hundred spams looking for a false positive, or you just trust the system and hope for the best.
Another bit of food for thought is that a lot of spam is sent via hijacked machines, and never comes from a legitimate account. Your sender pays arguement assumes that the sender is the one sending, not Jimmy Q. Insecure in West Virginia that decided his Windows 98 machine should be plugged directly into his cable modem.
My pet favorite for stemming the flow of spam is secure email; kill the SMTP servers and replace the "Simple" with "Secure." That doesn't mean that it would stop spam on its own. This is a complex problem, and it requires real thought.
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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/9069/27494#27494