Why Isn't SPAM Regulated Like Fax?

byronne asks: "It seems like spam has escalated so much lately that it seems to actually become a quantifiable bandwidth waster. The less bandwidth available, the less productivity due to spam-dedicated bandwidth is lost. Being primarily a phone system transmitted medium, why can't unsolicited junk email be regulated and controlled like junk fax? Just a simple question that I haven't seen anybody ask or relate together." SPAM is becoming more and more of a problem with today's e-mail. I used to find e-mail a valuable tool for communication, but even with filters, folders and SPAM software, I spend more time culling my inbox than I do reading mail (and if I see one more mail with "allhallowmas" in the title, I'm going to go postal!). Is regulation the answer? Many people fear such a move, but might it be time to give it some serious thought?

Comments

Fax Regulation vs Spam Regulation

[fwc]

Let me preface this with I think we need to do *something* about the spam problem, so the first part of this is *not* saying we shouldn't regulate Spam.

The reason that junk Faxes are against the law is because of the problems people were having with coming to work and finding a $50 roll of thermal fax paper spewed from their fax machines covered with nothing but essentially the content of most spam we're seeing today. This is a very real cost that you can put a figure on, and very definately was more expensive for the recipient to deal with. I remember hearing some stories of fax machines being tied up for hours with junk faxes.

The problem with spam is that it is hard to put a measurable cost on it, at least for the couple that the average joe gets a day. Plus, regulation in the US will just move the problem overseas in a lot of cases.

That said, I'm convinced that there is a very real cost to spam. I run spamassassin and literally get 200-300 spam messages in my spam folder every day, plus another 20-30 or so which spamassassin didn't catch. Conversely, I get about 20 legitimate emails a day.

On the mail server for the ISP I am the sysadmin for, spamassassin tags 75% of the messages we recieve as spam. We just spent $4000 buying hardware for our new mail server. If we had 25% of the load, we could have probably gotten away with a $1000 mail server instead.

Not to mention the times that a spammer decides to dump 10,000 messages on us within a 1/2 hour taking our mail server down to a crawl.

I'm hard pressed to come up with a workable, implementable solution which has any chance of working long term. Legislation has its problems. Technical solutions are a loosing battle on the filtering front. Economic solutions with advocate micropayments or similar (hashcash, etc) need to reach some sort of critical mass before they will help - but noone wants to implement them until they will. And so on.

There *has* to be a solution to this problem out there that someone hasn't come up with yet (or at least hasn't publicised properly).