Spam Lawsuit Clearinghouses?

cloudscout asks: "Spam is getting worse. Despite complex filtering and DNSBL systems the volume of unsolicited eMail continues to climb. The only promise so far has been an increasing number of laws designed to impede the spammers while others are using existing laws to tackle the problem. So when are we going to see this legal process become a commodity? There are already countless lawyers around the country who will accept a set price to fix traffic tickets, handle divorces and get the IRS off your back. When will we see attorneys who are willing to sue the spammers on your behalf for a reasonable, fixed fee?"

Comments

Re:Why does filtering work for me?

[Motherfucking Shit]

So, why does filtering work for me when it is supposedly futile?

As others have pointed out, filtering works for you because you're the one implementing your own mail filters. You know what you consider to be wanted and unwanted messages, and you've set up SA with some particular ruleset(s) to match. Unfortunately, this just doesn't work well at the ISP level. There are two reasons, really:

1. Who decides what does and doesn't get filtered? If you put the ISP in charge of this, invariably you're going to wind up with users missing legitimate email (remember, it's up to the user to determine which messages he or she thinks are legitimate). When Jane User loses an email from Mom talking about how things are going - which happens to mention how Dad got a prescription for Viagra - she's going to be ticked.

2. How much computing power is needed? You get 1,000 emails a day. AOL gets billions. And while AOL probably has the cash to invest in a few Gibsons to scan billions of inbound email messages looking for keywords, your average ISP is unlikely to make such an investment. (Interesting now that I think about it; if they're filtering for spam, what else might the world's largest ISP - conveniently situated in the middle of Spookville - be looking for?)

Point 2 becomes an extension of point 1 when you think about the "obvious solution" to the question of who decides what's filtered. That obvious solution, naturally, would be to implement a system where each user gets to set up his or her own filters; similar to what Yahoo mail has done on a rather limited scale. The problem there is yet more processing time. Instead of blindly applying the same filter to all inbound messages, with each message the recipient must be determined and their unique filter rules loaded.

It's not that filtering doesn't work. It does work, but it loses both effectiveness and accuracy when control moves away from the individual recipient. I don't want my ISP filtering my email based upon their idea of what looks spammish, or their idea of which hosts should or shouldn't be sending me email. But my ISP doesn't want to invest in the resources to let each of its users control their own spam filtering. As long as that catch-22 exists, ISPs are either going to filter everything equally or they aren't going to filter at all.

Even if there were a real solution available (aside from shifting the burden of filtering to the end-users), you'd still see the major ISPs suggesting legislation instead of filtration. The reason is that even bit-bucketed spam costs money to receive. AOL filters something on the order of a billion emails a day; assuming an average of 1KB per message, if my calculations are right that comes out to approximately a terabyte of bandwidth per day comprised completely of inbound trash. You can bet they'd rather see spam outlawed than have to sit around and pay for it.