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Jupiter Forecasts 50% Increase In Spam
Mr. Sketch writes "According to Yahoo, the amount of spam is expected to increase 50% in the next five years, meaning the average american will get over 3600 of them a year. The future of email is??"
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'cause they include clever spam filters.
I'm trying out POPfile (Naive Bayes text classifier and a POP3 proxy) these days, it's looking good so far.
-- From Denmark
I think that ISPs might decide to fight back. They're providing all the bandwidth to send this junk, and if they have to raise rates to their customers to do it, people will leave, causing their revenues to drop. It makes sense for them to nip this thing before that happens. Legislation, software filters, whatever...
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Between all of my email accounts, I get about 250-300 spam messages a day. My most active account at my own domain (which has a catchall) gets about 200-250 per day. I'd kill to only be getting ten spams a day.
I wonder how accurate that statistic is. Frankly, I'm amazed the "average" number of spams isn't already around ten a day or even higher. Almost everyone I know receives this much, and the ones who don't are pretty close. Maybe it's just because the folks I know use email more extensively than all the Grandpa Joes out there who only get a message or two from their grandkids in their mailbox every week? Such is the curse of email, I suppose...the more you spread your address around, the more spam you're likely to receive...
DennyK
I get more "Enlarge your penis!!!" Emails than anything else right now in my inbox (*sigh* if only it were true...)
Here we have the ultimate triumph of the marketdroids. These people think we would buy their stuff for sure, if only we heard the sales pitch. Hmmm... how about "not."
I've got news for them... you CAN'T sell ice to eskimos. This kind of ridiculous crap makes the sellers look like a bunch of charlatans (if the shoe fits...), and annoys the audience.
When I get carpal tunnel from pressing Ctrl-D, somebody's going to suffer.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
It seems we have found a use for Astrology!
Since when can a planet perdict an increase in Spam, read the headline, it sounds just like Astrology!
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
you only specify who you want to receive email from, and don't receive any other mail.
That would be a start!
Yeah, a pretty bad start, since it would take away most reasons you leave out your e-mail address; to let people you don't know contact you.
If we have to start whitelisting people to make e-mail usable, we have clearly lost the battle against spammers, since it would make e-mail much less usable than it is today.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
But at least my penis will grow by an inch or two.
And it'll always be hard thanks to those free viagra trials.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I think then the problem is that email just becomes slow instant messaging. I think widespread use of whitelists would be very bad for the email system.
Spencer Ogden
Yahoo has launched a 'war against spam'. I've actually had a yahoo account for a little bit more than a year and it has been relatively clean. (note that I've used it as my 'dirty' account, i.e. list submissions and suchs goes there...)
... Wouldn't a moderate number of 'Western' countries (North America, the EU, and a few others who might want to tag along) banning the sending of unsolicited mail and the marketing of tools and lists with which to do it make a serious impact on the amount of spam recieved? Sure, a certain amount of it comes from abroad, but quite a lot is domestic, too, and quite a few countries in these areas are prepared to pay for it who might not be if it were banned.
There needs to be a mechanism for the governments to pick up the excess cost of people recieving spam, rather than Jo Punter paying for it in a few extra pennies every time he dials up to check his mail...
Thus concludes the 8 o'clock news.
And now for the Spam forecast for tomorrow we switch to our techie in the basement.
john?, John are you there?
Yes margret, we're here in the basement of one of our nations largest ISP's, are we're looking on the screen.
As you can see, most spam will be concentrated in the north-west, and will slowly decent into the more southern regions of the nation. We can expect particulary heavy downfall of explicit spam, so parents, keep your children away from their mailboxes tomorrow!
As for the rest of the week, I am sad to say that it doesnt look good. we're likely to see a further increase, as we have seen in the last 5 years in a row now.
This has been John Geek from the basement of the heart of the digital world, back to you margret...
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
A new (secure) protocol?
It's because dummies like you keep responding to them! Stop encouraging them!!! They have no way of making you money, or giving you a horse-sized penis.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
The problem currently is that there's so many people who are doing a very good job at blocking / stopping most of the spam that the average joe or public official doesn't realize just how much spam is sent to his mailbox every day (or at least would be if it weren't for the anti-spammers).
What if for a period of time, maybe a week or a month, a day isn't long enough, the anti-spammers just quit. All of them. Let the spammers have an internet-wide orgy. Let people see how much of a problem this is - let the lawmakers make better spam laws, and then have the law enforcement stop them.
Blocking the spam is counter-productive, it only encourages the spammers to come up with better ideas on how to get it into your mailbox. The spam needs to be stopped at the source.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
The ability to send unsolicited email to practically anyone has long been a valuable online tool for everything from online protests (like filling your Congressman's mailbox with anti-DMCA flames) to communicating with intriguing personalities. A good deal of anti-spam legislation can be interpreted in ways that infringe on this basic cyber-right. Worse, the anti-spam cause could also be used by authoritarian interests to crack down on all unsiolicited emails.
Likewise, anonymous remailers and open relays have been used by people to protect their privacy almost as long as email has existed. These valuable tools of freedom can also be targeted by the Ashcrofts of the world in their bid to tie back our liberites, all in the name of crushing "spam".
Let us hope that privacy-loving interests will continue to develop technological solutions to the problem of spam, thereby keeping the solution to the problem market- and freedom- based rather than relying on the "good graces" of the State to keep junk mail out of our inboxes
Same here, i get *maybe* one email a day, and thats usually from a mailing list or something.
i only recently got a couple spams on my "real" email account (the one i run myself), my yahoo account i dont check for weeks or months on end (its one of those spam catching accounts for registering places, etc.) and my email at myrealbox.com never gets spammed.
i have never done any sort of spam blocking/filtering/etc.
here are some tips in case you dont know them already:
andeuh.....thats about it! so, to recap, do type your real user@host email address, anywhere!, and don't sign up for shady stuff with a good email address. man, this sounds so easy, why is it people have such a hard time...
Spamming is illegal throughout the European Union - I don't get hardly any spam from Europe (I get about 60 a day!), and if I get some, I am entitled to cash 250 Euros from the spammer... it works!
Unfortunately some third-world countries like Korea, China, Brasil and USA (!!!) still allow spam or are reluctant to fight spammers, so spam is still a big problem to the whole world.
Until those countries don't wake up and outlaw spam, the problem will persist
PS: I recently have put most of APNIC in my sendmail access-list - it eliminates 60% of the spam, but spam from USA is still an issue.
Greetings,
ms --
Same theory with spam. Except my amount of spam will increase 1000fold, and yours won't increase at all. I'm messing up the average. I should probably stop soliciting impotence advice from Dr. Spam-alot.
Sex - Find It
- Are you on a dialup?
- Do you receive lots of e-mails every day?
- Do you find that your own mail drowns in incoming spam?
Probably not. Not only do I get plenty of spam every day. That extra minute of having to deal with spam really bothers me, because I shouldn't have to waste my time like that. It might lead to me accidentally skipping a valid message because I mark a lot of spam messages for deletion and don't notice that important e-mail from a friend from long ago who's trying to get in touch with me because he has important news... Down the drain.Spam doesn't bother you? Fine, but don't pretend that it is not a problem to others. Don't try to blow it off like that.
It is, in fact, a major problem to a lot of people. Not only for personal e-mail, but our network administrators have to deal with absolutely huge amounts of spam that affect the network and its stability and reliability.
Our company has to spend considerable resources on fighting spam - resources that could have been spent fine-tuning other parts of the network to make everything run smoothly.
And then there's the amount of spam written in HTML and with images. Why should I spend money on downloading a huge spam message over my dialup connection?
Spam costs me money. It costs my employer money. It costs a lot of people money.
Spam is a real problem to a lot of people.
Clever signature text goes here.
A little calculation...
There are about 12 million businesses in the US alone. If one tenth of one percent of them sent you one email per year, it would amount to 1000 messages per month. Just a single, polite inquiry once a year by a tiny fraction of the legitimate businesses in the US, none of whom would suspect that they are causing a problem. As common as spam may seem, most businesses haven't discovered unsolicited email as a marketing tool.
That's the main reason we need anti-spam legislation. Not especially because of the aggressive efforts of a few assholes, but because of the clogging potential of even light usage by a vast number of businesses who mean no harm.
Perfect client side email filtering.
The more people blow this problem up, the more likely it is that legislators will try and tackle it.
And you know what that means; more bad "cyberlaw".
Much better to concentrate on solutions to a problem, rather than making repretitive and useless noises about the problem itself.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
i actually forgot 2 things (i knew i was forgetting them i just couldnt remember what they were)
ok, i'm pretty sure thats all of them now ;)
more like 6 months
:-)
I see a Moore's Law for spam - spam power will double every 9 months
So if you want to get into a growing industry work for/found an anti-spam company.
as ever with a
The future of email is??
I'm no fortuneteller but a good start would be an email protocol that fucking authenticates the sender so that you could be guaranteed that every email in your inbox has a from header that doesn't lie. No more untracable spammers. No more viruses that claim to come from your friends. As an added bonus, this would stop the flood of emails from various postmasters warning you that an email you never sent was not able to go through.
Seriously, SMTP needs to be redone and the sooner the better. I know there are things like TLS and SMTP auth floating around, but they are not pervasive or mandatory, so they do no good at all.
I'll probably loose karma over this, but here goes anyway.
Of course spam is an important issue. And it's damn annoying too. But I simply don't believe all these stories about how email is going to become crippled by it.
There are spam filters. More importantly, the use of aggressive blacklists forces ISPs themselves to take a tough line.
The questioner asks what the future for email is. Well, it's simple: email is fine as long as the user is sensible. I have several accounts. I know that my hotmail account is entirely unusuable because of the level of spam it recieves. If I need to give my email address to someone I don't trust fully, I give them that.
I have a work address. This gets a little spam from time to time as the organisation gets targeted. I filter out these spams with my own spam filter.
Mailing lists tend to go to another address. So far, I haven't had too much spam from that quarter.
My personal address is known only to a few friends. So far, no spam.
The rule for keeping your address spam free is the same as it ever was: don't publish it.
Now, what about people who want to advertise their address for open source projects and the like? Well, put it in the source code, in the README files, wherever you like. Just not on your web page.
It gives you the feeling that there are people out there who care enough to send you personalized, thoughtful solicitations. They wouldn't send it to you if they thought you didn't really, really be interested in the product they're selling.
Also, it's pink and tasty.
why run from Vincenzo?
There's no way in hell we're going to be that lucky. A 50% increase in 5 years would make me jump with joy.
The truth is it's increasing at a much faster rate than that. Recent research has shown that it's going up about 400% per year!!! And my personal email account verifies that sort of increase.
I suspect Jupiter is going to be eating its own words. In 5 years I suspect we'll be seeing perhaps 50 times more spam, not 50% more.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I configured SpamAssasin on our incoming mail servers earlier this year. Whew! Was I a happy man! Not enough is said about the great work the SpamAssasin team has done. It just works, filtering out >95% of the spam I receive (about 30 to 40 per day). And what about my hotmail account? I can't be bothered to look through that load of garbage anymore.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
India (the entirety of vsnl.in, which was the national backbone at the time) got unplugged from the net for a few days a few years ago because of Usenet spam. If some countries (e.g. the US!) legislate against spam, it will provide a tool to pressure other countries into it.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
An 8.5% p.a. rate of increase? I hope these estimates are correct - I'd expected it to be much worse.
.. that refuse to disconnect anyone spamvertising yahoo store URLs? I'm surprised yahoo has the gall to carry the story.
I write as the postmaster for a consumer email service, who enforces a strict abuse policy to prevent abuse at source. I do not consider client level filtering as a viable solution, it is a temporary stop-gap.
It cures the symptoms not the cause, around 90% of all inbound traiffic to our email system is UCE and somebody has to pay for this, in both traffic charges and server capability. This is a hidden cost passed on all email users, ultimatly the consumer.
It is for this reason that client side filtering is not a long term cure, it addresses the symptom not the roor cause. The long term solution must be the introduction of a trust network. The technology to make to possible is readily available in public key cryptography, what is lacking is the WILL. A system like this need not compromise anonymity, there are cryptographic protocols that allow for the establishment of anonymous trust with virtual identities. These same system can also be used to ensure email is cryptographically secure.
This system requires the introduce of a core network of trusted directory servers as part of the MTA backbone, a network of authoritive MTA's which can and will vouch its users.
This system is also vastly superior to the current black lists, which are far too centralised, clique and arbitrary, and fundamentally ineffective.
This proposal does no even prevent commercial email, if anything it allows this to legitimise, punishing the fraudsters and crooks whilst rewarding the responsible. It is entirely feasible to choose to accept commercial/bulk email from their bank, or OSDN.
Given time this will also provide participants a two fold advantage reduced costs and superior service.
Not everyone is in your position. It is not about mental capacity, but about time and money. When I check my mail on a dialup connection, and if I haven't checked it for a day or two, I have to download large amounts of spam. So much, in fact, that it drowns the e-mails I actually want to read.
The address I'm talking about now is not a very active one. It's mostly for friends and relatives. So rather than deleting the occasional spam amongst a number of valid e-mails, I have to spot the occasional valid e-mail in-between lots of spam mails. So I'll just point you back to the example with an old friend who tries to get in touch through e-mail, but never gets a reply because it was accidentally deleted, being hidden in tons of spam.
Snail mail? Sure, I'll just write a letter, take 50 dead tree copies of it and send it through snail mail to the 50 or so people on a private mailing list we run. That's sure to save me both time and money, right? Sigh.
I've already explained how spam is a serious problem to me personally as well as my employer. I forgot to mention how ISPs also have to deal with spam. If I am on a large ISP, you can guess how much spam they have to cope with. The spam wastes their bandwidth and disk space. The result is that running the ISP becomes more expensive, which again might lead to a lesser quality service or increased subscription fees.
How serious it is depends on the person, but you cannot deny the fact that it is a very serious and very valid concern to a lot of people, me and my employer included (I don't know about my ISP). People have all the right in the world to "whine" about spam. Why? Because spam is a serious problem to them.
(And your comment about dead-tree-mail is obviously nonsense. I don't even know why you bothered to try that one.)
Clever signature text goes here.
Wouldn't it be a solution if the people who coordinate the web installed some new central servers, like the DNS servers, to check emailadresses for sending spam?
The DNS servers return an ip address for a given domainname. The spamcheck servers would return a value for a given emailaddress.
This value could be modded up by the number of people reporting this emailadress as spam and modded down in time when people stop reporting this address.
Your provider will check every received mail with the central servers and store their spam value.
Your mailclient will receive only mail from your provider with a lower value than the value you configured. The rest will be removed from server at that time or only the headers of the bad mails will be send to your mailclient and put in a spamfolder where you can approve or remove them manually.
In 1970 there were 500 Elvis impersonators in America. Today there are 150,000.
It is expected that in the year 2020 one out of every three people will be an Elvis impersonator.
People shouldn't have to spend their time dealing with spam. Why should I have to? Why should I have to get multiple e-mail addresses because of spam? Why should my employer have to spend lots of money and resources on fighting spam, when it could have been spent elsewhere to improve performance rather than trying to prevent performance from deteriorating because of spam?
How does spam cripple e-mail communication, you ask? Again, you said it yourself. People have to start hiding their e-mail address. It will be harder to find a contact address to get in touch with them.
You are talking about spreading FUD. At the same time, you kind of contradict yourself by showing that yes, e-mail addresses can become unusable because of spam and yes, spam can cripple e-mail communication.
So where's the FUD? Spam is a serious problem to many, and you, as someone else I responded to, don't seem to understand this. You only seem to be able to see it from your own point of view. Maybe spam doesn't bother you. Well, I can inform you that it does bother me, my friends and my employer. A lot. It costs us money. It costs us time. This is not "gloom and FUD", it is reality.
Clever signature text goes here.
If people don't have the mental capacity to fairly easily filter out most spam, maybe they should stick to dead-tree-based mail...
-1, Utter Bollocks...
Why should I have to put up with endless financial scams and obscenity laden drivel whenever I check my email? Saying "oh, it's not hard to hit delete" is a cop-out. If you don't object to deleting 10 mails a day, what about 50? 100? 200? 1000? Presumably you have a limit on how much you'll take personally, so what are you planning to do when you start getting double that?
You wouldn't put up with it in any other medium (phone, post, people coming to your house), so why email?
Nae bother
Mercury Predicts: The sun will rise tomorrow.
Venus Predicts: A slashdot reader will not get laid tonight
Earth Predicts: You are here X
Mars Predicts: Continued fighting in the Middle East.
Saturn Predicts: More pictures will be taken of its rings.
Neptune Predicts: An unsinkable ship will eventualy sink.
Uranus Predicts: Someone will relpy to this post with a Goatse link.
Pluto Predicts: Disney characters will not enter the public domain any time soon.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I've been seeing a marked increase in the number of articles claiming we're all going to be knee deep in spam any day now. Most of these stories seem to be based on information comming out of a press release from MessageLabs - who interestingly sell services to defeat spam.
So IMHO I think the story should really be...
FUD increases sales of SPAM related services by 50%
SPAM is annoying, it's true. However, filtering it out is not rocket science - but then most people pull out the cheque book before engaging their brain.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
I have the mental capacity to filter spam, thank you very much. I have a procmail blocklist that is over 1000 lines now (I prefer single-domain blocks, plus a VERY small number of "content" rules like dropping HTML without a charset, due to false positives)
Normally, I read my mail on a machine with good filtering on a cable modem connection.
Problem is, I'm not always reading my mail at home. Sometimes I'm mobile, and often using my cell phone as a modem. That's a 14.4 connection that I pay per-minute. Eventually I could upgrade to a 1xRTT solution, but even with something like the Sprint "Unlimited Vision" plans, those only average 40-50 kilobits/sec. Thanks to spam, I cannot afford to check my email from my phone, and even if I could, it would take a half hour to download all the shit in my mailbox.
There are also plenty of dialup users in this country. It's not an issue of not wanting broadband or not being able to afford it, it's an issue of simply NOT BEING ABLE TO GET IT EVEN IF THEY WANT IT. This was my case until last February or so.
Simply put, these people PAY to receive spam. Even over a cablemodem, you pay in the form of increased ISP rates to offset their bandwidth/server disk space costs due to spam.
In short, client-side filtering is NOT the answer.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Direct client-side bandwidth costs are too.
All you have to do is look at the data services offered by cellular providers - Spam could easily double or triple (maybe even more) your monthly cost with such services due to the bandwidth it consumes.
As a result of spam, I can't check email from my phone. My phone (Kyocera 6035, integrated PDA/phone) is more than capable of reading mail, but the 14.4 per-minute connection (And even the unlimited Vision connection if I sacrificed coverage and got a Treo 300 on Sprint) just can't handle the 50 or so messages I get a day, 95%+ of which are spam.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
No need to get violent. No need to kill. The solution is simple, cheap, and pretty easy.
Just start using SpamAssassin. It's free and installs easily on modern unix systems using either sendmail or procmail. If you're stuck with Outlook on Windows, there's a company selling an installshield-based version for only $30 (considerably less that even the cheapest of murder plots). They claim to be working on support for other windows based clients, so if you're windows based and using another program, relief is probably on the way. They have a 2 week free trial version.
Spamassassin really works. They claim it filters about 95%, which should put your spam level between 12.5 to 15 messages per day.... very close to the desired goal of 10 (and nobody needs to die).
With SpamAssassin, every message gets a spam rating. Legitimate messages usually score under 3 points, and SpamAssassin's default threshold is 5.0 points. You can adjust the threshold where messages get filtered... I personally set mine to 7.0 because I'm a bit paranoid of losing any legit messages. But even 7.0 works great... most spam scores well over 10 points. If all your legit messages are scoring very low (quite likely), you might be able to safely lower the threshold a bit and get under that magical 10 per day. Personally, I find it filters nearly all spams even at 7.0.
Be sure to turn on all the "network" tests including the blacklists and razor. By default, these might be set to 0.0 points each, so they won't get used. They do take some time because they involve communication with other sites (very large ISPs with one mail server for thousands of uses don't want to spend that much time per message, but as an individual you almost certainly do). The blacklists often block legit messages, so give them low scores, but it's safe to set Razor (a database of known spam messages, with "fuzzy" matching) to a high value like 4.0 or even 5.0.
There's been a lot of hype lately about Bayesian filtering... and maybe someday lots of email clients will have it built in. And maybe large numbers of users will go to the trouble to sort their messages properly so the filters on each machine "learn". Maybe.
But right now, you can download SpamAssassin for free (or pay just a bit for a commercial much-easier-to-install-on-windows version), and instantly 95% of your incoming spam will be gone. Well, most people just have SpamAssassin modify the message and then they use their mail client or procmail to deliver the message to a "spam folder" (so you can occasionally look through it and remember the bad-old-days before you finally broke down and went through the not-really-that-difficult process of installing SpamAssassin).
It really works, it's free (or cheap), and it doesn't involve killing anyone.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I'm getting really ticked about this spam crap. This is something that the ISPs need to handle, and handle fast.
Why is it that they feel responsible to filter out Napster, Kazaa...filter out port 25...filter this, filter that, monitor this, monitor that....
Yet none of them can do something as simple as an opt-in spam guard. It's turned on by default..and you don't need some fancy enterprise edition. You need Exim, Exiscan and SpamAssassin. Done. Should take a half-competent fresh college grad admin about an hour to do.
Sure, some ISPs do it already. I remember when I was on Earthlink (2+ years ago) they had it...worked ok. How about everyone else? How about doing it FOR FREE?
You don't win the war on drugs by going after drug dealers or importers. You win the war on drugs by poisoning the drugs so noone wants them.
You don't win the war on spam by going after spammers or Asian servers. You win the war on spam by doing your part to educate end users and block it for them, thus removing the spammers' audience.
Corporate MS/RIAA/MPAA/FCC-like nonsense happening. When are these people going to wake up and do their part?
FYI, system stats to date for just my personal server at home:
SPAM caught to date: 4193 in 84,397,706 bytes
Viruses caught to date: 1018 in 277,420,970 bytes
Yes, I'm donating my spam collection to spamarchive.org.
Consider who is bringing you this information and take it with a grain of salt. Jupiter is in the business of consulting, and is on nearly every reporter's Rolodex as a source of that all-important statistic to anchor whatever tech story they're writing. So right off the bat they have a potential conflict of interest -- accuracy v. self-promotion as "the source" the data.
If you listen carefully, nearly every time a web usage statistic is cited it will be attributed to either Jupiter or Forrester Research -- another (surprise) consulting firm. Listen to the news for these names and you'll be impressed how lazy and naive reporters can be, they often do a lot less research than it appears.
Next, the NYT profiled them a couple of years ago in the Sunday Magazine. I don't have a link, but recommend you consider buying it (and I never do that!). Basically, it detailed how little experience the average analyst has; how difficult and unscientific it is to come up with data on things like banner ad clicks or to extrapolate tech trends; and quoted one analyst admitting that they were instructed, should the media call with a question they couldn't answer, they should make something up. Often they are spectacularly wrong, but who calls them on it? Again, the all-important goal is to get their name in the press, Jupiter is willing to give an opinion, it's free advertising. Note how Jupiter's name made it into even this short posting?
I hate to think of businesses making important decisions based on such loosely-derived bits of data. So when I see a spam prediction such as here, I know there's a fair chance it's either an uneducated guess or simply pulled out of someone's ass. Maybe they're right, but I'd like to hear about their methodology. If they say they just went to the Oracle at Delphi (don't those names sound familiar?) then get on with our lives. Spam will still be a problem either way; there are proven ways to fight it; realistically we will never allow it to get to such levels.
I encourage anyone interested not to believe me and do their own research. IMHO, this is one of the biggest scams this side of the pollsters and brokerage houses. I am deeply contemptuous of their work. Just a statement of opinion, not libel, no siree.
P.S. May I throw in that I don't like seeing spam victims blamed for their plight. I have been scrupulous with my email for years and still the spam is inexorably growing, largely because of some idiot who opted-in to a dozen things mistakenly typing in my email address instead of his. Now my address is burned into a CD somewhere. Fault is unnecessary; and regardless of fault, the blame lies with the spammer. Naive users do not "deserve" to have their email paralyzed, rather they deserve our sympathy and help.
Many broadband ISPs (such as Cox Communications) have started putting caps on traffic. If you are running close to those limits, the "tonnes[sic]" of spam you get might just put you over the cap for the last time, after which you might see your Internet access yanked.
What about people who pay for Internet access by the amount of traffic that they move? How about people who retrieve e-mail over long-distance phone connections when on travel? What about the ones who use their cell phones to retrieve e-mail, paying a per-minute charge?
That your ISP chooses not to itemize spam as a charge on your bill does not mean that it is free to you.
Spam costs businesses billions of dollars per year. That's money that could have been spent in salary increases, new office equipment, building renovation, R&D, development, production, or even office parties. All of it stolen by spammers.
I am so sick and tired of the short-sighted just-hit-delete response to spam. Why don't you give me your credit card number and let me use it to send you crap that you don't want? Then you can tell everyone that it's no problem because it doesn't take long to throw away the stuff I send.
I predict lots of people will go one step further. Web submission page. No mail box, no bulk spam. If you want to write me, fill out this handy form on a website.. I'm looking to doing this soon as de-junking a POP3 account is just too much lost time. I am looking forward to dropping traditional e-mail entirely.
Notice how most postings on slashdot are real comments and not a bulk dumping ground for adverts. They have something here by not taking bulk posting to this forum. Those who do FLAME, SPAM, or TROLL can't do it in bulk. It's one submission to one site, not 5 million. There are no bulk spams here that also hit 5 million other websites with one click.
Soon my e-mail will be like, "Fill out the form at slashdot.org/~technician"
The truth shall set you free!
Filtering is not a solution.
It's still wasting the bandwidth my company pays for.
On another note, spampal is a free solution for windows. Works like a champ!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin