Spam Blackhole Lists Redux

tsu doh nimh writes "Are spam blackhole lists good, bad or indifferent? That appears to be the question they're tackling in this Washington Post story. It has some interesting back and forth between supporters of the lists and those who claim they condone censorship." J adds: Brad Templeton recently offered some comments on the most extreme pro-blacklist position.

Comments

Black-lists, white-lists, they both are flawed

[confused philosopher]

Shouldn't email be open and free for the spammers? They have to make a living some how, it might as well be on the backs of ISPs and suckers.

I like the idea of white-lists, but big companies that send their customer's mass emails like PayPal does will suffer from those even.

It's not exactly counter...

[I'm a racist.]

See, you can say anything you want on the Internet... regardless of blacklists or whitelists. Provided, of course, that you host the data you want to distribute (or at least, pay someone else to host it).

Spam doesn't work the same way as something like a webpage (or Usenet, or IRC, etc). With most systems (HTTP for example), you must actively request the data you want. With email, the spammer makes that decision for you. That's the real problem with email, it's the IETF's equivalent of the Windows Messaging system (which, coincidentally, also gets spammed).

I did some development of push technologies for wireless devices. Preventing unwanted (from the network operator's point of view) push traffic out was a big priority. Email is, essentially, a push service as it's currently implemented, anyway.

Personally, I am leaning towards using a "web of trust" system, with confirmed authentication to prevent relaying of spoofed email. Sure, open relays should be legal, but that doesn't mean anyone has to accept mail from them.

Anyway, the point is, if you say something on your website (such as "niggers are great"), I do not have to read it. However, if you send me a nice big jpeg, with a smiling porch-monkey, that says "niggers are great", I end up having to deal with it. If I felt the need for a larger penis and an unaccredited degree, I'll bet Google could help me find places to get that... I don't need someone telling me shit I don't want to know.