Fighting The Spammers Down Under

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald is running an interesting article about fighting spammers. It mentions that "Most of today's email spam, however, comes from a handful of culprits, described by Barry and others as &quotknown criminals&quot." Does anybody else wonder who these people are, and what are the odds of having them shut down for good?"

Comments

Weak market forces control spam

[Philbert Desenex]

Sure, spam is probably profitable: it transfers most of the cost of advertising to the (probably unwilling) receipiant, and nobody ever went broke underestimating the Good Taste of the American public.

The problem with spam is that the dirty details of spam disassociates it from market forces, unlike other, more conventional forms of advertising.

In just about every other form of ad (radio or Tee Vee commercial, newspaper ad, billboard, etc) the advertiser pays for the ad up front, before you make a decision to buy the advertised product or not. So, if the ad is particularly repulsive, ("Ring around the collar!") the consumer can make a decision to not buy the product. The advertiser is out the cost of the ad. Of course, the cost of any advertised product is higher than an unadvertised product, so the consumers who chose to buy an advertised product ultimately pay for a portion of the advertising.

Contrast this with a spammed ad: the consumer has paid for his or her network time to receive the ad, the disk space to store the ad and the CPU cycles it took to process the email ad before getting a chance to decide whether to buy the spamvertised product or not. No matter how repugnant, stupid, wasteful, or dumb the ad is, the consumer ends up paying for the spamertising. Only very weak market forces control spamvertising. That's the real problem with spam.

Email spamming is theft, plain and simple. Email spammers must be punished.