Ask ISP Owner Barry Shein About the Spam Wars

Spam sucks. But it's worse for ISPs than for the rest of us, because they get bounces and complaints and other behind-the-scenes spam-caused messes the rest of us don't see. AOL talks of spam as "public enemy number one." Barry Shein, who started (and still runs) the world's first full-service dialup ISP, likens spammers to organized criminals, and calls spam "an organized, vicious, sociopathic thing" in this article, which spurred an interesting Slashdot discussion. So what should we do about spam? Ask Barry. One question per post, please. We'll post his answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions sometime in the next week or so.

Comments

Re:Bayesian Filtering

[jaoswald]

You completely miss the point of Shein's tirade.

By the time it gets to your inbox, it has already cost your ISP money (time/effort/bandwidth) to deliver it. You just see what leaks through your ISP's filters, despite their best efforts.

I ask for mod-love for the first time ever here.

[stomv]

Regarding the Baysean Filtering question...

By the time (spam) gets to your inbox, it has already cost your ISP money (time/effort/bandwidth) to deliver it. You just see what leaks through your ISP's filters, despite their best efforts.

While in the short term I concur, in the long term I must cry au contraire.

If Baysean filtering makes its way to the general public -- or is introduced at an ISP level, then it will reduce the amount of spam that gets through to potential customers, and hence make each spamming less profitable.

The least profitable of the spam messages will dissapear, thereby reducing the loads on our mailboxes and on the ISP as a whole. Therefore, perhaps a better question is:

Is there a way to use Baysean Filtering to reduce the costs an ISP faces due to spam?