Slashdot Mirror
Email (As We Know It) Doomed?
Mephie writes "A pretty interesting article at Slate.com takes a look at how spam may be killing email as we know it. With the increase of spam, the argument is made that more users will switch from blacklisting spammers to 'whitelisting' specific, trusted addresses, making email more like instant messaging: if you're not on someone's 'buddy list,' you have to prove you're an actual person (e.g. identify a word in an image) to send a message." May be?
There is a simple way to beat spam.
Spammers spam because they make money out of it, they are not just doing it because they hate you. All we as a community have to do is to make sure it isn't profitable. If someone wants to sell you something they have to leave you some contact details. Use these to waste THEIR time.
Tell them you want to buy their rubbish and send them a cheque for zero cents.
Send emails to their webmaster saying their site doesn't work with IE4, Netscape, Mozilla, whatever. (use a fake address)
Write a loop in your favourate language to reload their website once a minute.
Fax them the same sheet that just says "F**K YOU" a few hundred times. Use reverse font to waste their ink.
If everyone on slashdot went out of their way to waste just a little time, bandwidth or money from a spammer every day or two it would really hurt their profit margins. And no, they won't take you to court for pissing them off. They are in it for the money, not to prove a point.
The idea of SPEWS is not just to block spam, but also to force ISPs to terminate their spammers. Blocking only the spammer's IP is pointless; too many providers just move the spammer about in their IP space, and the world has to play whack-a-mole. SPEWS' policy is that if an ISP decides it wants to keep its spammer online in the face of repeated complaints, fine; but then SPEWS don't want to receive any email from such a network.
/. story a couple of days ago, went to her house and executed her gangsta style, then moved on to a few more, people would start getting the drift, and your spam would stop.
The only way to deal with spammers is with a shotgun. I think that if we started with the high profile ones, like the lady featured in the 'economics of spam'
If it didn't well, no problem, spam hunting could be about intimidation or just plain old elimination. I'm sure that there are enough people in places like china and europe that'd love to help, and not just gun-totin' 'merkins!
Come on people, join and rise up and lets show the spammers that there are actual fucking concequences to spamming, not just some "we'll sue you if you're in california" shit. Think that the random korean spammer selling whatever shit people sell or try to sell is going to give two shits about a US/california law? I don't think so. But have a bunch of guys knocking on his door with a shotgun, well, now there are some concequences you can "feel".
(this is of course (mostly) humor)